


When Sorrows Come

by Ironlawyer



Category: Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alien Invasion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Dark, M/M, Non-Consensual Kissing, Original Character Death(s), PTSD, Suicide Attempt, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 01:09:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 40,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12948054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer
Summary: When Tony gets captured by a sadistic alien who takes a shine to him, hurt and alone, he must deal with a ruthless tormenter as well as his guilt, fear and addiction.When he finally makes it out alive, he is a physical and emotional mess and must face the temptation to use alcohol to quiet his demons whilst rebuilding his home, his relationships and himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the warnings and keep in mind that this is not a pleasant story. This is a story about pain and trauma and someone who struggles with it. Not a happy story. 
> 
> Many thanks to Kiyaar for being an awesome beta and putting up with all of my nonsense. Also thanks robintcj for the extra pair of eyes.
> 
> This is for the 2017 Cap-IM Big Bang event. Please check out the amazing accompanying art by smolsofa which is embedded in the relevant part of the story and also on [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12949284) and[ Tumblr ](https://sony-rark.tumblr.com/post/168315847028/here-it-is-my-art-for-ironlawyers-2017-big-bang). Smol did a really awesome job with the Tony tears!
> 
> Also check out the awesome art by sleepyprince (beware, spoilers), which is also embedded in the relvent spot and [on Tumblr](http://sleepyoceanprince.tumblr.com/post/168321105898/my-art-for-ironlawyers-bb-fic-when-sorrows). So much amazing Tony pain!

Every night by six o’clock the streets of New York are dead.  Tony lies on his stomach in the rubble of a third floor apartment block, a den dug out from the stones and possessions of the family who once lived there.  The only thing anyone overhead might see is the flutter of a Thomas the Tank Engine bed sheet and a pile of stone and Agatha Christie novels.  He raises a pair of busted binoculars to his eyes and squints through the cracked glass.  A drone hovers fifty feet away, and the only sign of it is a faint blinking red light.  He watches the light fade as the drone moves into the distance, then marks the current time on a hand-drawn map of New York with a pencil sharpened to a stub.

The drone comes back ten minutes later. He calculates the movement speed the old fashioned way, then marks out its route on the map.  It’s a simple, circular one, and the drone is unlikely to present any problems.

He turns the binoculars to the plume of smoke in the distance.  Every night it funnels up in a thin column like a shaft of darkness cutting through the early evening light.  It reaches its peak some miles up, painting the invisible prison walls that encase half the country in a massive snow globe. An impenetrable prison, no one can get in and no one can leave.

He looks to the ground but can’t make out the source of the smoke past the crumbling ruins of apartment blocks and office buildings.  To the north hovers the mothership, a long thin hulk of glowing crimson like a knife wound opened in the sky.  In the east, where Central Park once stood, a vast hub towers over the landscape. Its pod-like structure and many tunnels give the impression of overground catacombs and countless walkways for sentries.  After the attack, it was erected practically overnight and has sat there like an ugly paint blot on an artist’s masterpiece – a constant reminder that he wasn’t there to fight.  He’d watched fires in the sky and looked away to get another drink.  The Avengers would take care of it.  And they’d tried, of course, but whatever he hadn’t been there to see was more than they could handle. Every waking moment he hopes they’re not dead and that there was nothing he could’ve done and that maybe there’s some way he can make up for this.

Rumour has it the source of the smoke is a work camp.  They come to the smaller outposts and round up the doctor and scientists and mutants with promises of food and clothes and shelter and if that doesn’t work they bring out the guns.  He’s snuck into five camps now and they all tell the same stories and never know anything more.  There are whispers of course – someone saw Daredevil scavenging tin cans from a 7/11, a friend of a friend said they’d seen Spiderman in the back of a truck and the Thing was hiding out by the remains of the Baxter Building in case the rest of the Fantastic Four turned up.  Weeks wasted gaining trust enough to hear vague rumours that could be disproven in a day. 

His eyes linger on the smoke.  These past few weeks he’s achieved nothing.  What tech he’s scavenged together from old TVs and computers is hidden below a tarp in the remains of the mansion, enough to make a rudimentary suit, but without a real power source he’d get maybe two or three minutes power from it.  He’d tried to shoot down a drone for its power core once, near the start of it: it had taken three repulsor blasts, then called in so much backup that he was lucky to escape.  He’d drunk a toast to his stupidity and passed out in the open than night.

If he’s survived this, an average human, lying in the gutter with a bottle of gin in his hand, there must be others out there, heroes, Avengers… Steve. But he has nowhere else left to look.  He marks the smoke on his map.  The people there will tell him nothing, but he will go anyway.  

Decision made, he rolls to his side and tucks the binoculars and notebook back inside his backpack and pulls out a flashlight.  With a screwdriver and a kitchen knife he detaches the pins and batteries from his makeshift repulsor.  It took him two weeks to get the parts and it would survive maybe two blasts.  The aliens have an ocean of better tech but he’d rather leave a pile of useless circuitry than contribute one more drop to that ocean.

He tucks everything neatly back in the bag, then rests it beneath his head and closes his eyes.  He hasn’t slept this early for as long as he can remember.  Even as a small child the most his father would do was send him to his bedroom and tell him to be quiet.  He could play or read or invent until midnight and no one would come to check.

Now though, he feels tired all the time.  There’s a constant heaviness in the atmosphere that weighs him down more than the chest plate ever did.  Every step feels slow and heavy like his bones are filled with metal.  He realises now why Wolverine is always so grouchy.

Of course, Steve would probably handle it like a champ.  A little heavy atmosphere wouldn’t phase a hero.  Wherever he is now, Steve probably punches his way through a half dozen little-green-men before breakfast.  Wherever Jan and Thor and Rhodey and everyone else are, they must be fighting.  And maybe, on the other side of that impentrable glass prison, the rest of the world is still fighting for them too.  Tony sighs and turns to his side; there’s a chunk of stone poking in his back and it’s what’s keeping him awake.

He tugs a battered copy of _And Then There Were None_ from the rubble and holds his breath as handful of rocks come loose and land with a tink on the exposed metal of a support beam.  But there is no one around to hear.  When his heart stops pounding he flips to the front page but in the half-light of the den he can barely make out the title.  Batteries are too precious to waste on reading so he puts the book back in the pile and tries not to think.

He digs out a bottle from his backpack.  It’s too dark to see, but he’s down to his last two bottles so he knows it’s vodka.  It will help him sleep.  It will keep him sane.  It will remind him of who he’s become.  He gulps a few shots worth and puts the bottle back, wedged between a two month old copy of The New York Times and a torn t-shirt.  This is what kept him in the gutter when he should’ve been by their side.  This is what keeps him going.  He wishes he knew how to stop.

When the booze kicks in, he lays down again.  Calmer.  Steve had told him once that when he was a little boy you didn’t have to go far from the city to see the stars.  Now Tony could poke his head out from the den and look up to see them anytime.  But he can’t or a drone might see him.  Everything seems so far away.  He closes his eyes to see the stars and hopes that wherever Steve is, he can see them too.

\--

He wakes before dawn. Usually the drones fall back around sunrise, but he doesn’t have time to wait and see today, so he downs enough vodka to take the edge off, pauses until the drone has drifted out of range then takes off in the other direction, bottle still in hand.

It must be mid-December by now, as the chill that’s been hanging over the air the last few week has gone bitter and if he looks close enough at the sky some days, he can see snow before it hits the glass and disintegrates.  This time last year he went shopping with Jan and nearly had a panic attack in the middle of Macy’s because he couldn’t find anything for Steve.  She’d dragged him to a little coffee shop so heavily decked in fairy lights he could’ve probably powered the suit with them, and they’d sat sipping hot cocoa as she catalogued all the reasons why Steve wouldn’t care whether Tony bought him a new car, a jacket or a toothbrush.

Now though, the only sign that Christmas is approaching is the cold.  Every time he stops moving to let a drone pass, he starts to shiver.  His once-white dress shirt hangs loose and its tears let the wind through to the point where he might as well be wearing nothing.  He pauses at the next apartment block and grabs a sweater from the remains of a crushed dresser - it’s crusted with plaster dust and two sizes too big.  He shakes free the worst of the dust, pulls it on and carries on through the rubble.

As he moves towards the centre of the city he takes a detour to hide beneath the counter in the burnt out husk of a bar, there was booze here once, but what little wasn’t destroyed he’s already scavenged.  Still, he pauses here, searches for something he might’ve missed.  Finds a shattered bottle with an inch of gin in the bottom, he picks it up and stares into it.  There are bits of glass and dirt settled on the bottom.  If he’s careful, he could drink it without disturbing them.  He hates himself for thinking it.  Hates himself for coming here.  Jan was right, he’s thrown everything away for this.  And still, he needs it.  He skims the clearest liquid into an unbroken glass and downs it.  As much as they would hate him for it, he needs this to keep going.  When he finds them (when he finds Steve), then he can quit.  He leaves the bar and heads on.

The centre of the city saw the wort of the blasts and there’s less cover here.  If he goes out past this last block, he could probably see the camp where the smoke comes from, but there’re few places to hide.  If he had the suit… but he doesn’t.    He hitches his backpacks higher on his back and heads for the only office block still standing.  The entire left side of the building is missing and it balances precariously on loose support beams and piles of debris.  It’s like the leaning tower of Pisa only less structurally sound. 

He walks in through an emergency exit on the right side that’s wedged open with a rock and wonders how many people made it out alive, and of those, how many still are.  The path to the stairwell is clear, almost untouched.  Except for a fine layer of plaster dust coating everything, you could almost imagine that on the other side of those doors were office monkeys typing up financial evaluations and discussing sports around the water cooler.

He makes it to the second floor before the cracks start to show.  There’s a long hairline fracture down the side of the wall, spidering off in a web of delicate splinters. The door here hangs off one hinge and he walks over and pushes it open.  On the other side, half of the room is crumbling away like it’s been hit by a wrecking ball. The other half is littered with the broken remnants of old office life.  There are bodies.  Dried and dark, like they’ve been long embalmed.  Some still sit at their desks, hands resting over the keyboard.  He downs a mouthful of vodka and doesn’t look too closely.  Doesn’t think that maybe Iron Man could’ve saved them.

As he crosses into the lobby he gets a good look beyond the wall.  The ground here is virtually levelled and the camp is comprised of a series of large marquees that offer little protection from the elements.  But the place is abandoned. There are blankets and clothes and books and a sewage ditch dug out of the dirt that drains off down an old manhole. 

If it wasn’t clear to him before, it is obvious the people here will know nothing, or tell him nothing of what they know, maybe both, but he has no other options.  Right now though, there is nothing to do but watch and wait.  He flips over an old desk, drags it to the edge of the room where the support beams are strongest and crawls under.

Hours pass and it is late afternoon by the time he sees people leaving the Central Park hub.  He turns the binoculars to them.  Groups of them swarm out heading for the camp like a colony of ants.  As they get closer the conglomerate dissolves into hundreds of haggard faces and worn clothes.  Old and young, men and women, muscular and skinny, they’re as mismatched as any random sample of the population.

There are a squad of guards and drones shepherding them back to the camp, and they stick to the road like slots cars stuck on their track.  They don’t speak or touch or look at each other, just keep moving forward. 

He drops down to the ground floor and ducks behind a section of wall that’s still mostly intact.  He waits and as the last of the group passes, walks out with his head down and his shoulders hunched and pushes his way to the centre where he stays in step with the rest. He could hide and watch, spend days figuring out if the camp is safe but he’s done playing cautious.

In front of him a small boy clings to the hand of a woman who is clearly not his mother.  The lights in the right heel of his Spider-man sneakers blink as he walks.  With a spare LED and a soldiering iron, it would take less than a minute to fix the left.  He doesn’t have either.

They reach the camp and the group dissolves.  A noticeable tension lifts from the air, and everyone moves like they are home and this is normal and there aren’t armed guards watching the perimeter.

Tony hangs back.  He finds a spot in the sun on the outskirts of the camp and watches.  Every settlement he’s visited since the invasion has had some of that heaviness, a grief and anger that no one puts into words but that lies like a weight over every interaction.  Here a couple sit arm in arm beneath the shade of an overturned car, someone’s singing songs by the fire and a man is washing clothes with a broom handle in a big plastic tub.  They seem settled, as though they’ve moved beyond their old lives and are content to ignore the dragon looming over their heads.

He goes unnoticed for a time, but eventually a woman approaches.  ‘Hey.’ She frowns. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’

‘No.’ Tony Stark is a relic and even if this skinny, bearded man he’s become bore more than a passing resemblance to the man he once was, that man is not a part of these people’s world any more.  There is no space for celebrity when life is consumed with living. ‘What are we doing here?’ He asks.

‘You’re new?’ She doesn’t sound surprised, so it seems as good an answer as any.  He nods. ‘Then maybe you should be asking yourself that, not me.’

‘I’m looking for someone.’

She laughs and sits next to him. ‘Yeah?  So’s everyone.  Tell me if you see my husband.  Six two, mid-thirties, kind of tubby round the middle.’ She pauses. ‘He was a baker.’

‘You’ve given up.’

‘Maybe.  But look at us.  We’re what’s left.  How can we keep clinging to something impossible?’

Maybe she’s right.  Of everyone who could still be alive out there, Cap’s the least likely.  He’d have fought this with his dying breath.  He pulls the vodka from his backpack, takes a swig and offers it to the lady.  He’ll go looking for more tomorrow either way, might as well have a friendly face to drown with tonight.

She takes the bottle.  They drink in silence for a time.  When the bottle is empty he turns to her. ‘Can I ask you something?’  She nods. ‘Did you really give up?’  He doesn’t expect her to answer.

‘Give up on what?  We’re still alive, aren’t we?  Look, you’re new here, but some of us have been here since the start.  We spent weeks telling each other that help would come.  That the Avengers would come and save us, or Spider Man, the Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight… anyone. We got so used to heroes always being there for every disaster it seemed impossible that they weren’t going to come.  It was all we talked about, who was going to come, how they’d do it, how long we’d have to wait.   But you have to give up some time, it’s nothing but pain to keep wishing for something different.  We’re done waiting for heroes, they’re a fantasy, like winning the lottery used to be, and we’re too busy learning how to live with what we’ve got.’

‘And can you?’

‘What?’

‘Can you live with it?’

She says nothing for a while then shrugs.  He figures that’s about all he’s going to get and the conversation falters.  ‘I didn’t get your name,’ she says after a time.

Maybe now she doesn’t recognise the face, but the name will be unmistakable.  The name last heard as a man in the gutter.  A failure in every way that’s important.  He can’t bring hope to these people.  ‘Steve,’ he says and it feels like blasphemy. ‘My name is Steve.’

She tilts her head and looks at him.  There is no scepticism in her face but he feels as though she sees the lie anyway.  ‘Alright, Steve, I’m Carla,’ she says. ‘We better find you a place to sleep.’

She finds him a sleeping bag and an old towel to use as a pillow and leaves him on the outskirts of the camp.  People sleep crowded around the fire on cushions and pillows and mattresses.  Tony’s spot is right on the edge of camp, evidently the lowest in the pecking order, and perhaps once he might’ve found that funny, but now it is only a reminder of who he has become.  Cold nights sleeping on the street, the laughing stock of the media and all who knew him.  He is no worse off now than he was before.

He lays down, turns his back to the fire and digs out the last bottle from his backpack.  He feels cold inside and out.  The sleeping bag is warm and soft and even this far out the heat from the fire takes the chill from the air.  The vodka warms his insides.

\--

Before the invasion, before the booze, before the Iron Man, he used to lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours every night. His lamp would flick on and off with a steady rhythm as he jotted down ideas.  Weapons usually.  When he became Iron Man his lamp would stay dark, but still he didn’t sleep.  Of all the problems the booze contributed to this one it helps solve.

He wakes to someone grabbing his wrists and pulling him up.  He squints in the half-light of the before dawn moonlight and as he’s dragged to his feet, for the first time he sees the faces of the enemy up close.  Their whole bodies are built squat and square, like they’ve been compressed into half their normal size, their necks jutting out between their shoulders so it looks as though they have perpetually hunched backs. There is a faintly luminescent glow to their dark blue skin and every inch of their exposed flesh is marked with deep, deliberate scars, like ritual decoration.

One of them holds him with an arm around his neck and there are three others, all armed and strong enough to snap his neck between two fingers.  He doesn’t fight because he might be using the name, but he is no Captain America.

One of them leans in close to his face. Its nose twitches like it’s sniffing him, then it blows a cold, foggy snort in his face and its breath smells musky and wet like cigarette ashes left out in the rain.  It turns to a woman who stands a few feet away.

‘This is the engineer?’  The English overlays a crackling, growling animal sound, like a translator talking over someone on a news broadcast.  The sounds seems to originate from the alien’s helmet as if there’s an inbuilt speaker but it’s clear and simultaneous as if the alien is speaking himself.  Maybe its mechanical, maybe there’s some multilingual alien on the other end, either way he’d like to get his hands on the tech. 

The alien grabs Tony by the hair and tugs his head towards the woman.  Carla, he recognises now.  She nods.   ‘I’m sorry, Mr Stark.’  But her face is cold and there is nothing in her voice.  He wishes he could hate her, but he understands desperation too well.  With a growl, one of the aliens dumps an unconscious man at her feet.   She hauls his arm around her shoulder and with only a perfunctory second glance, scrabbles to get away.

The leaders starts to walk away and the arm around Tony’s neck loosens only for him to be hauled over the alien’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  They begin to walk away.  As much as this should worry him, Tony doesn’t care where they are going, or what they want from him.  He remember the feeling in the hospital, shaking and sweating and needing so bad.  ‘Hey,’ he cries and grabs for his bag but he can’t reach it. ‘My stuff, get my stuff.’  They keep walking.  ‘Dammit.’  He punches the heavily armoured shoulder of his captive but it just hurts his hand.  He closes his eyes and tries not to think about how fucked he is.

\--

It’s about ten minutes later when they reach the hub in Central Park and he’s thrown to the ground outside.  Up close, the structure looks almost as if it’s made of opaque glass. Long panels of dark, convex, reflective surfaces lap over each other like the scales of a fish.  It makes sense how they erected it so quickly; one little push and the whole structure would collapse like a Chinese lantern. It’s an architect’s wet dream.

Someone nudges him with their foot.  ‘Walk.’  He gets to his feet and walks behind the leader.  Why they couldn’t have done that in the first place he doesn’t know, but it feels good to be back on his feet.  As they approach the glass shell, it dissolves into a mist of black particles and the alien leader walks through.

Tony stands and runs his hand through the black particles, he tries to touch them but no matter how fast he moves they hover out of reach.  They must be reactive somehow, sensing his movement, perhaps.  He wonders if all of the panels react this way, or if this one specifically is designated a door.  He could stay and play with them all night but a nudge to his back reminds him that he is not in control here and he steps through the mist.  They lead him through a series of winding corridors, carpeted with a spongey, grey grass that absorbs the sound of their footsteps.  If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine that he was alone.

They take him to a room of cells.  Glass pod prisons lining the room like a hotel corridor.  They are all empty.  They walk Tony to an open cell near the back and wait, no shoving or shouting.  The cell is furnished with a bunk and there’s a faucet over a drain.  It’s hardly the Ritz but it’s better than a park bench or a sleeping bag.  For captors and evil alien invaders it’s all surprisingly civil.  They must want something from him.  If Steve were here he’d have socked them and made a run for it already, but chances are going for a sucker punch would leave Tony with a broken hand.

The leader steps closer and a chatter like a revving engine sends ripples through his throat.  Tony shows his hands and steps into the cell.  As with the main entrance, the mist breaks back into a solid wall. From this side it’s opaque and when he touches it, it sends a buzz down his arm like static electricity, but this time it stays solid.

The voice of the alien sounds as if there is nothing between them. ‘We shall return to discuss your situation at a later time.  Now you shall wait.’

‘Hey, wait,’ he says, but he can hear them walking away.  ‘Dammit.’  He punches the door and hisses as it sends a jolt down his arm, like a static shock but ten times the punch.  It must be powered by something electrical and if he can access the source from in here, maybe he can use it.

He scours every inch of the cell, but it is nothing but smooth walls and a cot.  There’s nothing electrical for him to work with so he has no option but to wait.  First he paces, then he sits on the bunk with his foot twitching rapidly.  The buzz from the vodka has long worn off and if there were ever a time he could use a drink, that time would be now.   The alien said they’d be back soon, and even though Tony won’t co-operate, if he pretends well enough he can surely make some of his own demands.  A scotch would be heaven now, but he’s gone days and nights and weeks without before.  He’s faced aliens and monster and people sober in the past.  He will be fine.

Hours pass.  His head pounds with every heartbeat.  He closes his eyes and tries to ignore it, but he pictures a glass filled with ice and amber and his mouth waters with the thought of it.  Just one sip and he’d be fine.  He could think straight again, focus on escape.  Information.  Avengers.  The fire in his head and the ice in his hands are unrelenting but he’s done this twice before and he can do it again.

He gets up and flips the spigot and watches the water rush down the drain for a while.  It’s clear and unscented so he splashes it on his face and the back of his neck.  He hovers by the drain, head dipped, and hand clamped over his mouth as his stomach rolls, but he can’t keep still.  He paces.  There is only room enough for four full strides so he’s left dancing like the ballerina on top of a music box.  His fingers tap a frantic beat on his thigh.

He throws himself on the bunk and buries his head in the pillow.  Moaning like a dying animal, he rolls to his side and into a fetal position.  In the hospital, he’d thought that was the worst of it, now he feels like he is dying - feels like he wants to.  He curls his fingers around a lock of his hair and tugs.  He has never been more pathetic. Thank god Steve can’t see him now.  He recites pi under his breath and numbers that usually flow like water come like sludge through a sieve.  Each second drags like minutes.  His heart hurts.  Maybe it can’t take this.  They said in the hospital that even a healthy heart could be damaged by this.

Time passes in a haze of pacing, writhing, and moaning.  Then they come for him.  Two guards, their scarred faces crinkle when they see him lying on the floor that isn’t cold enough.  They wear the same translation devices as the others but they hiss something unrecognisable between themselves. Tony ignores them and moves his clammy cheek to a cooler spot.

They drag him up on feet that won’t hold his weight and he sways like a seaman on solid ground for the first time then grabs at the arm of one until he is steady again.  ‘What happened?’  This time their translator clicks on and there’s that same strange overlay over their natural language.  He’ll be dammed if they get an answer.  They shake him softly, as if to wake him, but his eyes stay closed.  Perhaps if he ignores them, they will leave him alone.

‘We should take him to Krzik, he will find out who did this.’

They drag him through the halls of their base, he should be taking it all in, drawing a mental map and noting anything that looks like tech he could work with, but it’s all he can do to keep moving. The lights are like a thousand needles poking in the back of his eyes so he walks most of the way with his eyes closed.

They reach a throne room, dimly lit with open flames, all sharp angles and decorative blades, the marble-like floor so polished it reflects the ornate system of veins and arteries painted across the ceiling. Their king is sprawled atop a throne made of splintered bone and metal and does not react to their entrance.

The guards drag him across the room and throw him at the king’s feet.

‘Your mechanic, sir,’ says one.

‘We found him like this,’ says the other.

The king turns to look at them now.  He watches Tony as he struggles to his feet and clenches his shaking hands.  The king rises and steps closer, his eyes still locked on Tony.  He waves to the guards.  ‘Dismissed.’  The clang of their feet as they leave rattles in Tony’s brain like a cymbal sounding next to his ear.

The king circles Tony with deliberate, heavy paces.  There’s an elegance to his movements, like a tiger watching its prey.  His face reveals nothing.

‘I am Commander Krzik of the Cyax,’ he says.  ‘And you are Stark of the humans.’  Krzik begins to pace, his entire focus glued to the floor, as if Tony does not exist.  Tony could tackle him but something tells him Krzik is paying more attention than he is letting on.  ‘I’ve been told great things of you,’ he says.  Tony wonders who’s so desperate for a hero or so under a rock that they would say anything kindly about a public catastrophe and a drunk.  ‘I am in need of a mechanic, and yet I find something else presented to me.’

‘I’m not doing anything for you.’  His words are shaky when he needs them to be strong.

‘You think you’re in a position to refuse?’

‘I don’t care what position I’m in.  I’m not even a mechanic.  Not anymore.’  He gave that up with Iron Man, the Avengers, his business, his home, everything.

‘No?’  Krzik steeples his hands, fingers at his jaw and mouth.  His claws cut his lips and blood drips down his chin.  He is unmoved.  ‘I think you’re right.  Much more than a mechanic.’  He turns to Tony, grabs his hand and holds it up. His fingers tremble like a freezing man’s.  ‘You shake.’  Tony says nothing.  Krzik smiles.  ‘You are in pain.’

Tony shakes his head.  ‘No.’

‘I feel it.’  He reaches for Tony’s face and holds it between his hands.  Tony doesn’t process the information at first, he flinches only when Krzik’s hands press hard against his ears.  ‘You are in pain.’  Tony doesn’t deny it this time because he is sure that if he opens his mouth he will throw up.  ‘Where is your injury?’

Tony shakes his head and it feels like his brain is sloshing around.  He’s hit by a wave of vertigo and leans in until his head rests against Krzik’s chest.  A heavy hand rests in his hair and Tony imagines that it is Steve’s and everything will be okay.   Perhaps if he’d been stronger, they wouldn’t have fought, and perhaps he could’ve had Steve’s help like he’d once had Bethany’s.  Maybe then he could’ve been Iron Man, an Avenger, at Steve’s side.  He would’ve seen this coming and they could’ve prepared a battle plan.  If he were a better man, he wouldn’t be here.

The hand strokes his hair as if to comfort him but it only hurts more.  ‘Where is your injury?’  Krzik repeats. 

‘No injury.’

‘You are suffering, but you are not hurt.  Then what is wrong with you?’

He is captive.  He is tired.  He is alone and he has nothing.  He has passed on his ability to fight and has been left with the ruins of a man who lies in the flood and waits to drown.  If there were a greater good he could die for, he wouldn’t, because he is not a hero.  He needs a drink. 

‘It’s just the flu or something.’ He knows the way his hands tremble.  He is not sick, he is only… sick. 

‘The flu?’ 

Tony looks at Krizik and he’s met by a puzzled frown.  ‘It’s just a human disease.  I’ll be fine.’  Krzik slaps him and his sandpaper skin tears at Tony’s cheek chafing like carpet burn.  ‘Jesus Christ, what was that for?’

Krzik smiles.  ‘You are perfect.’  He cups Tony’s bleeding cheek.  ‘You will be so much more than my mechanic.’

Tony swats the hand away.  ‘I said.  I’ll never do anything for you.’

Fingers in his hair, tugging.  ‘There is some fight in you, then?  All the better.’  He reaches for a large metal sphere that rests by his throne and strikes it.  A melodic chime rings through the room in waves like a soft sonic boom.  Two Cyax guards appear in the doorway, armed with crackling electric spears.  They cross one arm across their chest and stand to attention.  ‘Take Stark to my quarters.  He is mine.’

The guards rap their spears twice then point them at Tony.  Krzik returns to his throne, his hand rests on the sphere, his legs draped across the arm of the chair.  A guard pokes Tony with the dull butt of his spear and Tony rises.  As much as he would like to protest, his mind is hazy and his limbs are weak.  Like this he’d win neither a battle of wits nor a battle of strength.  In Afghanistan he learned the value of biding his time.

They lead him away, spears pointed at his back.  Through opulent rooms decorated with weapons, velvet, and deep reds and blacks and metals.  Everything looks cold and heavy and they meet no people.

Another cell. The same faucet and drain, a metal bunk but no bedding, no carpet.  There are chains on the walls and the concrete floor is stained with a deep, dark brown he is almost positive is old blood.  The guards follow him in.

The spear shocks the back of his knees and he collapses.  A hand on the back of his neck, pressure just shy of crushing.  He is pushed to the ground and struggles to breathe.  He kicks, but his foot is grabbed and boots and socks tugged off.  ‘Get off me.  Get the fuck off me.’  He kicks again and his foot snaps against armour with the crunch of cracking bone.  He cries out.  Now they hold his legs down.  He writhes but he is not strong enough.  His clothes are shredded and stolen from him.  His skin prickles on the icy floor.  The hands lifts away but he doesn’t move.  They do not touch him.  He hears movement, noise.  Water jets.  Hands scrubbing at his skin until it’s red and raw and not-quite painful.  He doesn’t move.

The water turns off and he hears the guards move away.  A creak of metal locked in place and he is alone. 

He lays shivering and sprawled with his eyes screwed shut.  His heart still hammers.  It can’t take this.  Perhaps he will have a heart attacks and die here and now, before whatever is going to happen can happen.  Perhaps he should hope that.

After a time, he crawls away from the puddle and huddles for warmth.  There is little to be found.  His head rages and his hands tremble and he doesn’t know if it’s the cold or the cravings.  He rests his head against his knees and clamps his hands over his face.  He tastes the phantom fruit of whiskey and wishes that he could wish for something else. 

More time passes and still he is alone.  He looks around the prison they have thrown him in, but there is nothing more to see.  There is nowhere to hide and nothing he can use.  Even the chains he tries not to think about won’t come loose from the wall.  He lays down in the warmest corner of the room and tries to sleep. 

\--

The door bursts open and Tony jolts awake.  Steve would’ve been waiting by the door to tackle whoever entered, but there he is, lying in a stupor, like this isn’t important.  Krzik stands in the doorway and Tony jumps to his feet, still a little wobbly but with enough dignity left to try.  Krzik walks over and without preamble slaps him across the face.  The barely healing cut from earlier opens up again and warm blood trickles down his cheek.  Tony steps back but Krzik follows.  ‘What do you want from me?’  Krzik hits him again.  ‘I can’t give you what you want if you don’t tell me what it is.’  He is not so weak that he will give them what they want regardless, but without even knowing what that is, he has nothing to work with.

Krzik laughs.  ‘There is nothing for you to give but this.’  Blade like claws flick from the tips of his fingers like Swiss army-knives.  He slashes and Tony jumps back, wobbling and hissing as weight hits his injured foot.  Claws catch his chest leaving faint red marks where the skin is barely broken.  Krzik howls.  He dives and takes Tony to the ground.  Tony’s head smashes against concrete and he yelps.  He is dragged to the chains and they’re snapped so tight around his wrists his fingers begins to tingle. Krzik backs off and paces, a faint rumble from his throat like a purring cat.  ‘You are perfect.’

‘Perfect for what?’ He tugs on the chains but there is no give.  Whatever is going to happen now will happen.  There are no Avengers about the burst through the door and rescue him. 

Krzik approaches and cradles his bloody cheek.  He smears the blood like an old lady rubbing chocolate from a child’s cheek.  ‘Pain,’ he says and smiles.  He grabs Tony’s arm and runs his claws down the flesh.  Tony tries to pull away, but Krzik is strong and there is nowhere to go.  He keeps his face placid and his breathing regular.  If this is all they want from him, he will not give it.

Krzik drops his wrist and chuckles.  ‘You cannot hide it,’ he says.  ‘I know it hurts you.  I feel it.’

‘I’m not afraid of pain.’  He spits in Krzik’s face but gets no reaction.

‘Good.  Let’s not play child’s games.’

\--

Blood drip, dripping, like a leaky tap.  Bones snapping, crushing like nuts in a mortar and pestle. He screams because it doesn’t seem important not to.  Laughing.  Words he cannot hear and does not want to. 

Once, he’d have believed the Avengers would come for him.  But they walked away when he couldn’t be who they wanted him to.  There is no one left who might care.  Blood in his eyes, stinging but he can’t wipe it away.  The Avengers are not coming.  Maybe they are dead.  Maybe Steve is dead.  His fingers twitch.  Nothing to hold on to.   His breathing is shallow and rapid.  The pitter-patter of his hyperactive heart.  The smell of burning bacon.  He pukes.  He might be begging if he could stop screaming.

Krzik’s face hovers close to his.  Misty breath of acrid metal smothers his skin.  He looks away but his face is dragged back.  ‘Listen.’  Tony hears his own gasping breath and nothing more.  He shakes his head.  ‘You’re an artist.’   His blood paints the floor like a Jackson Pollock.  He shakes his head.  ‘You are.  I will show you.’ 

He tugs on the chains until his wrists bleed.  A kick catches Krzik square in the nose.  No response.  Blood trickles down Krzik’s face, red and viscous and just like human blood.  Krzik smiles.

‘Fuck you.  Fuck you,’ Tony says and he means it to be venomous, but his voice is cracked and weak.  One more thing stolen from him.  If he weren’t alone, he could be strong. If Steve were here he would say something smart, but these are all the words he has.  He will die here.  Maybe soon.  Maybe it’s been a long time coming.  He only wishes he could have one more drink.

Krzik wraps a hand around his throat.  Claws rip the back of his neck as fingers clench tighter.  Tighter.  He can’t breathe.  Weak, wheezy grasps.  Only instinct keeps him trying.

Maybe Krzik doesn’t know that humans need to breathe.  Maybe he’s just done.

He is dying.  He has thought that before.  In Afghanistan every heartbeat brought him closer to death and he had been sure at times that he would die.  There is no chest plate here.   The fingers squeeze tighter.  He gasps but gets nothing.  No air.  No air.  He feels the thrum of his heart trying too hard. 

‘Listen,’ says Krzik.  There is nothing he can do so he listens but still he hears nothing. His throat is released.  Krzik punches his stomach.  He still cannot breathe.  Static in the edges of his vision.  Phantom fingers still tight around his throat.  Bruises already swelling.  He gasps a breath of fire that swells his lungs and clamps his throat and he wishes it was over.  ‘Do you feel it?’  It hurts to breath, it hurts to move, it hurts to think.  He is still and silent.  ‘Your blood reads like the most elegant poetry.  But for now, I tire of reading.’ 

Krzik releases Tony from the chains and he falls to the ground.  His face is resting in a puddle of puke and blood but he can’t move.  His fingers are numb and his right hand is swollen where the fingers have been snapped and crushed.   They start to prickles as sensation returns and it’s all he can focus on, it hurts in a way the rest of him doesn’t.  If he could, he would wrap his hands around Krzik’s throat.  The weight of his body behind the thumbs on Krzik’s larynx.  He would squeeze and push until his fingers went numb again and he didn’t have to feel this.  If Krzik would beg he would not let go.  He sees Steve scowling.  It’s a vicious thought.  He shouldn’t have it.  It shouldn’t bring him comfort.  Yet.

‘Do as you wish.  I will be back for you tomorrow.’ And he is gone.  An earthquake come and gone so quickly, yet leaving behind so much pain and sorrow and destruction.  Pain is nothing new to him, but pain like this different.  He’s read books and papers about torture by psychologists, doctors, philosophers, because it happens in his line of work, just a fact of the job.   But this is different.  There is no purpose here. 

He shakes off the cloud of death, crawls to the wall and leans, panting, against it for several long minutes.  He grabs the chain and leavers himself to his feet.  He trembles.  His blood is drying on the floor.  He will leave stains like whoever came before him.  Someday some poor bastard will see his blood stains on the floor and wonder what they have coming.  He needs to leave this place.

He staggers across the room, finds the door unlocked and throws it closed behind him.  His is in a bedroom.  This guy has a dungeon like other people have an en-suite.  Filtered red light spills across the room from floor-to-ceiling glass that makes up an entire wall.  Velvet drapes, wall hangings, everything is violent reds and purples.  The same mossy grey carpet from the halls tickles his toes.  Itchy and damp, it’s like walking barefoot across a muddy field, but his feet stay clean and dry.  His boots lay by the doorway.  He limps to them and holds them tight against his chest, the fingers of his good hand playing with the strings.  His clothes are nowhere to be seen, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be salvageable.  He focuses on moving before his mind can linger on that thought.

The plush bed in the middle of the room is lined with animal furs and fluffy feather cushions.  It looks like a king’s.  There is only one.  He pulls the furs and cushions to the corner of the room and builds a nest.  It looks like a dog’s bed.  He supposes that is what he is.

He sinks to his knees like an anchor to the sea floor.  He will rest now, for a little while.  His body is wading through water and his mind through quicksand.  If he had a drink he could think clearer, but sleep will be the next best thing.  He lays his head down but his eyes will not close.  He sees nothing and feels everything. 

He is dead but his body doesn’t know it yet.  There was so much he might’ve done.  He never meant to be anyone’s hero, he wasn’t made for that.  Not like Steve.   Steve was born to be a hero.  Every moment of his life built up to it and every moment since he’d proved it true.  But Tony was born to be a bum and maybe for a time the suit had fooled him, but life has a tendency to course correct.  He should’ve died in the gutter, a bottle of expensive Scotch in his hand.  But life is crueller than that.  Heavy in body and soul, he shutters away his mind until body takes the rest.

\--

The phantom echo of a voice crying lingers as he wakes.   There was blood on his hands.  There _is_ blood on his hands, but it is brown, flaking and his.  Most of the wounds on his arms and chest are scabbing over but there’s a gash on his leg that still bleeds sluggishly.  He’s not going to get stitches here.  He should wash, at least, left like this he’ll get infected fast, but the only water source he’s seen is in that room.   Maybe an infection wouldn’t be so bad.

His body doesn’t want to move.  It’s like his limbs have been tied to the floor, even rolling over is an effort.  Krzik said he would be back; he can’t wait here.  He struggles to hold the cloth in place with the forearm of his crushed hand, as he ties the fur around his shoulders and waist.  They make him look like a cave man and graze his wounds every time he moves, but better this than naked.  He loosens the boot laces for his swollen foot all the way and it still hurts him, but it’s his and he feels more human for it.  He searches the room for anything he can use for support, or a weapon but there is nothing.

Taking listing strides across the room, blood trickles down his knee and his boot flip-flops against his broken foot.  He stands at the door and slides his fingers round the ridge where it connects to the wall.  There’s no give, he can hardly fit a fingernail through the gap.  No lock or mechanism to work with.  It may as well be a concrete wall.

He strikes the wall.  Staying here is giving up and Cap would never take that.  Still he doesn’t move.  Iron Man was only ever made of Dutch courage.  His fear disgusts him.  He’d find a way out that door if there was a bottle on the other side and that disgusts him more. 

He turns from the door to check the rest of the room.  There’s another door at the other end of the room, next to the cell.  Small, wooden, something he can definitely get through.  He lurches now as each step sends fire through his bones.  Sweat drips down the back of his neck but it’s a familiar kind of cold sweat he knows has nothing to do with the pain.

He reaches the door and finds it’s not locked.  A store room, or more like a tool closet.  A torture chamber.  Rows of knives, smooth, serrated, long and short, twisted like drill bits, jagged like saws.  Hot pokers, whips, and all kinds of gruesome devises he can’t identify and doesn’t dare to look too close at.  He recognises some of them.  A knife with a notched tip.  It’s clean, as though it’s never touched flesh.   He holds back a shudder and tries to look away, but his eyes keep drifting back.  They’re all laid out in some sort of glass display cabinets, like trophies.  The same kind of impenetrable glass the rest of this place is made of, only clear.  He hits it, but there’s no strength to the blow and even if there was, it’s obvious he can’t break it.  Steve probably could.

He turns from the weapons to the rest of the closet.  The stuff he can actually use.  Jars with neon pink viscous goo he doesn’t dare touch.  No disinfectant.  No antiseptic.  No bandages.  There’s a mop.  He smiles at the thought of Krzik in his torture chamber with a bucket of dirty water, whistling, mopping up blood and grumbling about the stubborn stains.  It’s shouldn’t be funny, but it’s better than crying.

He finds a box of empty syringes and tries not to think too hard about what they might be used for.  He sits on the floor, snaps the tip off one and tugs the longest, thickest strings of fur from around his shoulders.  He twists them into a thread, and balancing the needle on his knee with the base of his right wrist, he funnels the thread through the tip of the needle and holds it in place with his thumb.  He stops for a moment to consider his sanity, but blood loss will kill him before infection can.  He pinches the needle, to secure the thread in the tip, and hopes it’s enough to hold.

Shaky fingers of his left hand stab through skin.  It stings but not as much as he’d imagined.  He watches his fingers move like an image on a static plagued TV.  It’s almost calming.  His fingers can’t keep the needle straight.  Never really learned to be ambidextrous with more than technology.

Six jagged shark tooth stitches.  He wipes his bloody fingers on the furs, but it only smears and sticks to the dry patches from last night.  He pushes the needle in the fur like a pin.  It’s not much of a tool, but it’s a start.

He rests his head against the wall.  He could stay here, lay on the floor with a mop for a pillow, prop the door closed and sleep until the infection takes him.  Maybe Krzik won’t look for him here and he can die in peace.  But if he dies here and nothing changes, they’ll find someone to take his place.  Some poor kid who doesn’t deserve this.  He let it get to this, so he doesn’t get to die yet.  Being a selfish drunk was a hell of a lot easier before the Cyax invaded.

He gets up and rests weight on his leg.  The fur on the pelts is stronger than any animal’s he’s ever known, but he can’t be sure it’ll hold.   If it breaks, it breaks.  At least he can tell himself he tried.

Two steps from the door, he pauses and turns back.  He hasn’t been thinking straight.  Too much strain, dragging his brain through a fog.  Coming off the booze turns his brain to mush, but this is like being mashed then sieved, then blended.  

He grabs the mop and twists the head off.  Half propped against the wall, he leans on it.  The plastic stop on the end works like a grip.  It holds his weight.  He goes back to the bedroom, huddled over the stick like an old man and leans back against the wall, head resting on the cool glass.  He’s been here before, stuck behind enemy lines and he isn’t cut out for it.  All that time playing at being a hero, and it only ever brought trouble. Yet here he is, no weapons, no plans, no backup.   A kind of karma, maybe, telling him that his life’s a mess, hero or no hero.  God, he needs a drink.

He paces for a while, considering his options, or lack thereof, then tears the room apart looking for anything he can use - some hint of technology, or anything sharp and heavy.  He pulls the mattress from the bed frame, but there are no springs, and the base is to heavy and solid to move.  No hooks for the drapes, no windows that open.  Not even a book he can pass the time with.  He has never felt so helpless. 

\--

Hours later footsteps approach and there’s nowhere to go.  ‘Stark.’

Tony staggers back.  Too much pressure on his foot.  He stumbles and his legs go out from under him.  His hands out as he hits the floor, a wave of agony shoots through broken bones.  He cries out and cradles his mangled hand then laughs because he’s a wreck on the floor and Krzik hasn’t even raised a hand.

Krzik is watching him with a cold, commanding leer.  ‘Get up.’  The pain has hit him, sudden and breath-taking and his muscles are tight and unresponsive with it.  He wishes he was just too stubborn to follow the command, but he would get up if he could.  Krzik growls and steps closer.  ‘I said get up.’

He fumbles for the mop handle and leans against the wall.  Krzik nudges him.  ‘Yeah, yeah, get up.’  Between the wall and the mop he leavers himself to wobbly feet.

Krzik steps closer, right into his personal space.  Tony steps back, Krzik steps closer.  And again.  Caught in a perverted ballet until they run out of space.  It’s just a game.  He’s a mouse in the cat’s eyes and nowhere to run.  He stops because he won’t be a play thing.  Krzik’s thumb reaching out, tips his head back and he looks at the bruises on Tony’s neck.  ‘So beautiful,’ he says.  But all Tony feels is sensitive, swollen skin.  He wishes he could see what Krzik sees.  ‘Come with me.’  He can’t run because there’s nowhere to run to.  He can’t fight because it’s David and Goliath only he has no stone.  Everything goes still.  Someone’s thrown the breaks on his brain.  Krzik has stepped back toward the cell, waiting for him to follow.  ‘Stark.  Are you being insubordinate?’

There is nothing he can do.  So he does what will make him feel better.  He swings the mop.  Snap and crunch of jaw.  No reaction.  Krzik spits a tooth.  It bounces off Tony’s cheek and catches in the fur around his shoulders.  Tony swings again, but Krzik catches it this time.  Squeezes with one hand until it crumbles to so much wood chip.   Two halves clatter to the floor.  ‘You like games then?’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’  Sweat rolls down the back of his neck.  His stomach rolls.  He’s about to puke on Krzik’s feet.

‘You have no choice.’  Krzik’s hand around his throat again.  He kicks and pulls but it is useless.   He is choking.  Dragged by the neck to the cell and there is nothing he can do about it.

His arms back in chains, pulled high, suspending him on tiptoes to keep the pressure off his fingers.  The furs are pulled from his shoulders and thrown across the room.   ‘Why are you doing this?’ Tony asks.

‘Why does a man paint or write?  You are a work of art.  Perfect.  Beautiful.’  Krzik kisses him.  And all Tony can think is, oh.  Maybe because he’d seen the signs, maybe because it’s just a kiss.  It’s not shocking and it’s not terrible.  And maybe that is worse than if it was.  Krzik’s breath tastes of smoke and salt, and his teeth catch on Tony’s lip, biting till he bleeds.  Tony wants to throw up, but he doesn’t feel sick anymore.  Krzik pulls back.  A finger running along Tony’s bloody lip.  ‘Perfect.’  His hand drifts to Tony’s neck.  An almost tender caress.  Tony is shaking. 

For a while, they stay there and Tony wonders if this is going to be it.  Krzik’s eyes are closed like he is tasting fine wine.  Maybe tonight this is all he wants.  Please, he thinks, let it be all he wants.  Maybe Tony can still live with this.

But Krzik snaps from his daze with a blow to Tony’s face.  ‘No,’ he says.  ‘Maybe not quite perfect yet.’ He leaves the room and returns with a whip.  Dark, well-worn, red leather with a sharp metal tip.

The cuffs are undone and he is dragged across the room and pushed face down on the bunk.  Head turned to the wall because his eyes won’t close but he wants to see nothing.  It is easier to imagine that this will end.

He could roll over.  There are no chains or ropes holding him down.  He wonders what Krzik would do.  It wouldn’t stop him, maybe just make him worse.  He lays as still as he can, lets his muscles go slack.  It’s little comfort but all he can do.

The first hit is sharp and sudden but it doesn’t cut the skin.  He knows the feeling of blood flowing too well to miss it.  At first it doesn’t hurt much; he’s felt infinitely worse.  It stings but it is dull, just enough to take his mind off other pains.  Almost a positive.

It doesn’t last.  Again and again, whip meets flesh.  Sores upon sores.  Cutting skin, hitting cut.  He tries not to count but his mind keeps track of these things on a level that is far beyond his control.  Ten, twenty.

He can’t breathe.  Every time he tries he is hit and his breath is stolen.  Mouth open, wheezing, desperate, choking.  How long can he go without breathing?  How long before he passes out.  Please.  God, let him pass out.  How long can he survive this?

He doesn’t know if he’s shaking, or if it’s the rhythm of the whip.  His back is hot like acid’s been poured over it, yet he is intensely cold.

Forty, fifty.  He wonders what his back looks like, imagines something like raw hamburger meat.  It wraps around his shoulder cutting the nape of his neck.  Trails down his buttocks and thighs.  There will be nothing left of him.  He wonders what will make him stop.  Maybe he will be lying dead and Krzik will keep going until he is nothing more than a pool of blood and bone.

But Krzik does stop eventually, when Tony has finally lost count.  When his eyes are barely open, when his mind is drifting, when he could almost imagine he hears Steve’s voice.  Krzik pulls him up by the hair, twists until he’s looking him in the eye.  ‘Tell me,’ he says.  ‘Tell me how it feels?’  And that is all he wants.  No weapons, no secrets.  Nothing that will make him stop.  Nothing he can lie about.  No atomic bombs he can pretend to make, or friends he can pretend to betray.  This is all he wants.  Tony gives it.

Simple words that don’t express it.  Perhaps a poet could, but all he knows is that it hurts.  He says as much with drained words dragged deep from tired soul.  Nothing is intelligible, but Krzik is happy.  He hates that he can tell that without looking, without hearing.  He is dropped back to the bench and this time, he finally passes out.

\--

Days drift into days.  He lays where he’s left, sometimes the floor, sometimes the bunk, sometimes he’s strung up in chains for hours.  He’s never fed and he doesn’t know if that’s ignorance or another form of torture.

Sometimes, when he’s been lying alone for hours and he wonders if Krzik is finally bored with him, he thinks he hears voices.  Steve’s voice.  Like this is just a dream and he could wake up and see him smiling.  _You can do this Tony,_ and _be strong_ and _please hold on_ and _don’t give up_ and maybe sometimes when he’s tired and desperate and he needs something to hold on to, _I love you._   But when he opens his eyes there’s no one there and no one coming and Krzik always comes back.  He knows the sound of human bone grinding into dust and the noise a man makes when he’s burned with a cattle prod and the smell of week old blood that’s mixed with piss and puke and the difference between fire and acid and hot metal on skin.  Sometimes when he hears Steve’s voice he tells him to go away.  He is worse torture than the pain.

He’s started sweating and shaking all the time, feeling like he’s going to be sick.  Even though he’s long over it, it feels like withdrawal all over again.  He’s been waiting for this.  If he could pick, it’s not how he’d have chosen to die, but now, he’ll take anything.  Maybe for the next two or three days he can lie there and take it because he knows someday soon he won’t have to.

This time, when rough hands are rolling him over and running down his stomach like razor blades he can’t stomach a moan.  There’s nothing in him to puke up and no energy to do it.  His eyes stay closed and his body limp.

There are only seconds, or minutes, or hours of this, he doesn’t know anymore, only that it is less than usual.  Fingers on his face, pulling his eyes open.  ‘You’re dying.’  Tony smiles, Krzik growls.  ‘What’s wrong with you?’  Tony says nothing.  Krzik’s fingers are digging into a cut on his stomach, stretching it, slowly tearing skin and wiggling inside of him.  ‘Tell me what is wrong with you?’

The desperate, part of him that still clings to life with some instinct far beyond his conscious mind is ready with answers.  Through raspy breaths, he says, ‘Infection,’ and wishes he was strong enough to say nothing.

‘You are infected?’

‘Yes.’

‘It kills humans.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am no amateur.  You won’t die before I intend it.’

He is dropped back to the floor, his eyes drift closed and he hopes he’ll never open them again.

\--

‘Can you tell me your name, son?’  The voice comes to him through cotton wool.  The words reach his brain but it’s like listening to someone speak Klingon.  He hears but does not comprehend.  The words repeat and repeat and each time they are clearer.  He wants to say shut up.  He would choose to stay in this world of half-light and almost imagine that this is a dream.  That he could open his eyes and find himself wrapped in warm cotton sheets, the New York skyline alive and untouched, pain just a bruise from the last time they saved the world.  Steve brewing coffee in the kitchen and he’d throw an arm around his shoulder and say, ‘Nice work yesterday, Iron Man.’

It’s just a fantasy.  Words of protest break in his throat and he wonders what sort of animal noise he makes.  ‘That’s it.’  The voice says.  ‘What’s your name?’

He knows he should tell him, if only to get him to shut up, but his mouth is filled with sand and his jaw is so tight it could be wired shut.  He could fight it, struggle to open his eyes and his mouth and give the man an answer, but it doesn’t seem important.

‘Come on, son.  What’s your name?’  There are hands on his face.  Soft, human hands.  Then a warm, wet cloth wiping the dried blood from his eyes, gently unpeeling them like the pages of a stuck book.  It is incredibly painful and unbearably kind.

Maybe this means Steve has come.  The Avengers are here to free him.  They will take him somewhere like home and they will stay with him and they will let him have a drink, because this time they will know why.

His tongue peels from the roof of his mouth and in the barest whisper, he says, ‘Tony Stark.’

The man’s soft hands pause and rest on his skin like heating pads.  ‘Like the inventor?’ The inventor.  Not Iron Man, because even if people had known that was him, it isn’t anymore.

‘Yeah,’ Tony says.  ‘Like the inventor.’  The cloth is running down his chest now and it is made of ice and iron filings.  Maybe this is just a dream and Krzik never left.  He lets his eyes flutter and through the murk he sees grey hair and long, thin, human limbs. ‘Steve?’  But Steve is blond and strong and would never touch him, drunk and weak and angry, like this.

‘No.  My name is John.’ 

He closes his eyes again and imagines that it is Steve.  He would bring Tony home as they had brought Steve home all those years ago.  If he sleeps, maybe help will come.  Steve, Rhodey, Jan.  He’s shaking now.  The floor is hard and cold and the air is glued to it, heavy and thick, it won’t fill his lungs.  ‘Steve?’ He asks because he’s sure he remembers Steve.  ‘What’s going on?’

‘No, Mr Stark, I’m a doctor. I’m going to get you fixed up.’

‘Where’s Steve?’

‘I… I’m sorry, I don’t know who Steve is.  Can you swallow this pill for me?’  He’ll do anything Steve asks of him.  A hand on his back pushing him up.  Burning coals against charred flesh so bad it’s almost painless.  Chalk on his tongue, it sticks to the blood.  There’s water at his lips and his body tries to steal it, instead he coughs.  A muttered curse.  He’d apologise but he can’t stop coughing.  ‘Slowly.’ He hears and he doesn’t know the voice but it is gentle and calm and it reminds him of Steve.  Water again and this time he swallows.

‘Good, good.  I’m going to clean some of these wounds now.  I’m sorry, I don’t have any anaesthetic.  It’s going to hurt but it needs to be done.  I’ll do my best to be gentle.’

He’s rolled onto his stomach.  The twist of a cap and his ears prick and his nostrils flair.  Acid poured over his back.  He screams and writhes.  It blinds him with burning darkness and spinning colour.  It deafens him with white noise.  It crawls inside his body and steals control of every muscle.

And when he comes back to himself, it steals him again.  His mouth waters.  His skin crawls.  All pain is forgotten.  His world is narrowed to that sharp smell and that phantom taste and that buzz of numbness.  ‘I need a drink,’ through hoarse voice and gritted teeth.  Water to his lips.  He shakes it away and it dribbles down his chest.  ‘Please,’ he says, ‘I need a drink.’

‘This is rubbing alcohol, you can’t drink it.’  There is no mercy here.

‘Please.’

‘It could kill you.’ 

Something stirs in him at this.  He’s been lying here dying for the past day or weeks or months, and now when it is close and he is ready, he doesn’t get to choose.  ‘Look at me.’  He wants to shout but there is nothing left of him.  ‘I’m lying on the floor fucked up so bad I can’t pass out.  I’m in constant pain with no hope of rescue.  In a few hours the literal monster that did this will be back for the next round.  Do you think I give a fuck if it kills me?  I need a goddamn drink.’

‘I’m sorry.  I wish I could help you.  I’m a doctor, I don’t want to see people suffer.  They said you were sick.  That I had to help you.’

Because it was too much to ask that they would let him die.  ‘Krzik brought you here.’

The doctor nods.  ‘I know what you want, I’m not blind.  I can see why you need it, but I’m a coward.  I’m sorry.  You need to stay alive.’

‘I’m tired.’  And as the doctor cleans his wounds, wraps him in clean white bandages until he is only a hint of pale untarnished skin, he says no more.

When he is done, the doctor packs his things in stiff, sharp movements and no longer looks his way. ‘Can you stay a while?’ Tony asks. This is his only human company, his only kind face.  His only reminder that there is still a world out there.  ‘Please?’

‘I’m sorry.’  He seems to mean it.  ‘I can’t.’  The words to beg lie heavy on his tongue, but they won’t come, not because he is beyond them, but because he already knows they won’t work.  ‘I’ll be back soon, though.’  He takes Tony’s good hand and squeezes.  He should not be grateful for this one last touch but it is something to hold on to and he has precious little of that left.  ‘I promise.’  And Tony chooses not to believe in him because there is no good here and it is too hard to cling to hopes of home and kindness and peace.

‘When you do,’ because even if he doesn’t choose to believe it, hope is a persistent beast and it clings to him with whatever vestiges of strength it can muster, ‘can you bring some whiskey?  Or vodka.  Anything.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’  And he is alone once more.

\--

Krzik looms.  His muscles flex as though he’s about to run a marathon.  A pre-emptive pain ripples through Tony.

He lets his eyes close and dreams of a partner standing in the halls of their home.  Battered uniform and blond hair.  His smile.  Something soft and warm that would touch him as he has not been touched.  But they are dreams and this is not a place for dreams.  The cut comes tearing through his fantasies like acid rain.  He tries to hold on, but his picture is weather worn, features blending into a swirl of generic man.  As he tries to search for him, he only grows dimmer.

Claws cutting into cheeks are not the hands of a man who might’ve loved him.  Dreams like these are pain as sure as the knives on his flesh.  He wakes to reality.  Dragging by his feet, chains locked around his ankles and hauled tight and high.  His fingers graze the ground.  Krzik strikes and his blood flicks like splatter paint across the walls and floor.  A piñata that spills his blood like candy.  He giggles.  Krzik laughs.  Blood trickles down his arms in ticklish blobs and the chains rattle as he squirms.  Krzik squirms too, like an awkward dance when no one’s watching.

Those fresh white bandages now canvases for blood.  He is going to die soon.  There is only so much a body can take.  No doctor can perform these kinds of miracles.

Click as the chains release.  They’ve barely gotten started.  His head cracks on the floor and blood runs into his eyes.  He is pulled up by the wrists.  Dead weight is the most hostile he can be.  Krzik slaps him and blood trickles down his chin and in his mouth.  The taste always lingers, it’s more normal now than not, there’s no toothpaste here to wash away the taste.  He read once that in ancient Egypt even Pharaohs would get tooth abscesses and live in agony until the infection went to the blood.  Krzik would like that.

‘You’re still dying.’

He’s dumped to the floor and the door slams before he passes out.

\--

‘Hey! Mr Stark?’ Gentle hands peeling flaky bandages dried to broken skin. ‘Can you wake up for me, Mr Stark?’  He grunts.  There’s something soft balled up beneath his head.  Chalk and water on his tongue again.  He’s so tired.

‘I got you something.  It’s not much but…’  He feels a shot bottle pressed into his palm and fingers stay there until his own sluggish fingers wrap around the bottle.  ‘I’m trying to find morphine.’  It’s a nice thought, that something so simple could take away this pain.  He wants to be free of pain but more than that, he wants to be free of life. 

He opens his eyes, looks at the whiskey and wishes it was more.  ‘This is good,’ he says.  ‘Thank you.’  He needs to be alone.  Savour this moment in ways that will not make sense.  One moment that can belong to him.  A cure-all in a two ounce bottle to cauterise too many open wounds.

The doctor stitches the worst cuts and changes the dirtiest bandages like this isn’t pointless, like they won’t do it all again tomorrow.  He holds water to Tony’s cracked lips until he finds the strength to drink, washes the flaked blood from his hair and doesn’t ask why he hasn’t drunk it yet.  When all is done, he leaves again with the promise of morphine next time he returns.  This time Tony almost believes him.

He props himself against the wall and sees the balled up sweater he’d been using like a pillow.  He reaches for it, runs his good fingers over the fabric.  If he could put it on he might feel almost human again.  But it would be pointless.  Krzik would come back, cut it and take it and remind him of what his life has become.  He rests the sweater over his lap and even though it barely warms and covers little, it comforts him.  He rests his broken hand in the warmth and rolls the bottle in the palm of the other.  He wants to take his time.  Needs to savour this.

His fingers tremble and slip on the cap, but he keeps trying.  It’s too hard to do this with one hand.  He growls under his breath as the bumps on the cap tear open the cuts on his fingers and slick the bottle with blood.  It’s just a dammed twist cap.  A child could open it. The bottle slips from his fingers and rolls away and he sobs.  It comes to a rest against the wall a few feet from where he sits.  It could be miles.  There’s a tightness in his throat and chest, his breathing shakes.  He won’t cry.  Through all of this he hasn’t cried.  It’s just a damn bottle, it’s just a few feet.  He puts the sweater on the floor for friction and shuffles himself closer.  Heavy breaths that might be sobs.

He stretches his fingers round the bottle and collapses on the sweater.  Holds the bottle to his chest as his breathing calms.  He needs this.  He deserves this.  He puts the cap between his teeth and twists.  Spits it out into his lap and holds the bottle to his nose.  Should’ve thought to do that before but his mind’s so slow now.  He takes a sip and then another.  Hardly tastes it and then the bottle’s empty.  It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something. 

He tips the bottle up and licks the last drops from the rim because he’s just that desperate and pathetic.  Screws the cap back on loosely, puts the bottle down in the corner and wishes he wasn’t so pathetic he’s already planning to smell it later.  He balls the sweater up, rests his head on it and closes his eyes.

\--

In his dreams, Steve is there.  Cowl back, hair flat and neat as if he’d never worn it.  His face is blank.  Tony is lying on the cold, wet sidewalk, his fingers covered in blood and wrapped around a bottle.  He drinks, but it tastes of nothing.  It slips from his fingers, rolls, Steve stops it with his foot.

‘You’re drunk,’ says Steve.  He crushes the bottle, the glass explodes and sticks in Tony’s arms and chest and face.  Tony tries to say no.  He is never drunk anymore, only normal.  But he can’t speak.  ‘Pathetic.  You deserve this.’  He reaches for Steve’s ankle, because maybe if he touches him, Steve will know how sorry he is.  When he touches him, Steve is gone.  His hand is wrapped around Krzik’s ankle.  Everything becomes darkness and pain.

\--

His breath comes fast and heavy but it doesn’t seem to reach his lungs.  He opens his eyes and through the sting of red static he can see Krzik’s smiling face.  Threads of blood trail down his face and arms and chest, a tiger who’s been rolling around in his kill.  Tony read once that a man can lose forty percent of his total blood volume before death is all but guaranteed and he wonders now if this is what that forty percent looks like.  Maybe the next time he closes his eyes he won’t open them again. 

He turns his head away from Krzik and reaches a hand out to leave a print in the pool of drying blood on the floor.  He curls his fingers out like he’s making an angel in the snow.  If he looks at his fingers resting in the larger print he can almost imagine that someone else is there, touching him.  He feels the warmth of his own blood like the warmth of a hand beneath his fingers.  The sound of heavy breathing melts away into the whispered words of an indistinct lullaby.  Steve wouldn’t let him die alone.

If he had strength left to cry now, he would.  This is the man he is going to die as.  Too drunk and too sober and as alone as he’s chosen to be.  Before all this, he had dreamed of dying.  Lying on a park bench with the wind numbed by booze he would close his eyes and hope that he would never open them.  He would wake up never as numb as he needed to be.  He is numb now.

Krzik grabs his hair and forces Tony to look at him.  Still there is a kind of pleasure and beauty there, the way the blood glistens on luminescent skin, the tight wrinkles at the corner of his eyes from the smile of a man who is truly happy.  If he were a painting he would be gruesome but beautiful.  Tony wonders if this is what Krzik sees when he looks at him.  He closes his eyes.

Krzik slaps him.  ‘Look at me.’  Tony does, because it’s beyond him to fight now.  Krzik closes his eyes and breaths like he is smelling roses.  ‘Beautiful.’

Maybe Krzik sees a broken, stub of a man, all blood and bone and nothing else left.  Is there beauty in that?  He would’ve said no, once, that there is nothing but sorrow, but now there is a part of him that wonders.  Maybe there’s no beauty in blood and pain, but there must be something in death and the freedom from it.

\--

The doctor’s hardly through the door when he announces, ‘I found morphine.’  He sits at Tony’s side and takes out a small glass vial and a syringe.  ‘This will help, I promise.  I’ll get you cleaned up once it kicks in.’ He carefully measures a syringe of the stuff and taps out the air bubbles.  Tony wants to tell him to give him all of it.  Let this be over.  But he can’t because it’s not just his life anymore.  He has to keep living because maybe Krzik would kill the only man who’s helped him.  Or maybe he would take him next.  No one should suffer this.

The doctor tuts as he tries to find a vein on skin so dotted with scars there’s hardly a clean spot to see them.  He feels the needle go in and on some level he knows it should sting.  Maybe once he’d have hissed and pulled a face and let the doctor laugh at him.  Now it’s like being gently poked, hardly registers as anything worth noting.  The plunger goes down and he feels it cold in his veins.  Then nothing.  He groans.  ‘How long?’

‘A few minutes.  Just try to relax.’  He takes his pill as always and waits. The doctor fetches the sweater.  It’s speckled with blood now so he folds it around the worst of it and rests the cleanest part under Tony’s neck.  ‘I think you should have this.’  The doctor puts the needle in Tony’s palm and closes his fingers around it.  ‘Maybe it’s nothing, but, who knows.’  Tony nods.

The needle’s maybe two inch of metal but he has nothing, nowhere to hide it and it will stand out on the dark, bloodstained floors.  But he still has the bottle, small and untouched in the corner, Krzik is always too distracted to notice or care.  He sticks the needle inside and lays down to wait.

Minutes pass.  He can feel a warmth running down his spine, like he’s lying on a heated blanket.  He feels light and free and nothing.  His body is weightless, maybe hovering an inch above the ground.  His fingers itch terribly and when he looks at them meaning to scratch, he sees the cuts and burns, the missing nails and the way his pinkie is still snapped out of place.  ‘Oh.’  He knows that his body is in pain, the burns are still there, the cuts, the breaks.  He feels none of it.  It’s like he’s looking at himself through a microscope.  Nothing quite belongs to him.  ‘That’s nice.’

‘Good.  Good.’  The doctor smiles and Tony smiles back.  Scrubbing the dirt from wounds is just a soft cloth brushing skin.  Stitching his wounds, only a gentle pressure.  Snapping his finger back in place is just a noise.

‘Listen,’ the doctor says when he is finished, ‘this’ll last a couple of hours.  This bottle’s all I’ve got.  I wish I could leave it with you, but… I’m sorry.  Tomorrow.’ 

‘It’s fine.  It’s good.  This is good.’  He doesn’t want to think about the hours from now, just lets himself float on a cloud of nothingness.  Closes his eyes and really rests for the first time.

\--

When Krzik returns, for the first time Tony looks at him and feels nothing.  He rests his head back on the makeshift pillow and laughs.  There is nothing he can do to him.  For the next few hours he is free.  It’s a victory that won’t last long, but is sweet all the same.

Krzik stands over him, a monolith casting a shadow across his possessions.  Tony keeps his back turned, and stares into the shadow.  He’s sinking in it.  Like a black hole.  ‘Your healer, he’s fixed you?’  Krzik asks.  Tony doesn’t have to say anything, so he doesn’t.  Krzik nudges him.  ‘Answer me.’  Tony is silent.

Krzik kicks him.  Tony’s body rolls like a ragdoll, it feels like he is bouncing on a trampoline.   Another kick.  Just pressure in his chest.  ‘You’re broken.’  He says it like a child whose toy’s been smashed.  He grabs Tony by the chin, hauls him up and looks into his eyes.  ‘What is wrong with you?’

Tony smiles.  In all his time as Iron Man, taking down criminals, saving lives, none of it has ever felt quite like this.  ‘Nothing.’  For now, everything is perfect.  ‘Absolutely nothing.’

Krzik shakes him and Tony lets slack limbs flop.  ‘Who did this?  Tell me what is wrong with you?’  It occurs to Tony that for all the pain Krzik’s caused, he has never seen him angry before.  When Tony does not reply, Krzik throws him to the floor and begins to pace.  He growls something sharp and vicious that goes untranslated and storms out of the room.

\--

Tony stares at the ceiling.  The creeping sense that he should be worrying tickles the back of his mind, but he can’t quite focus on why.  It’s just a distant anxiety drowned out by the buzz. There are spots of dried blood even up there, little flecks of dirty brown, hard to spot on the dark ceiling like distant stars on the night sky.  He squints and counts and loses count more times than he cares to think about, but slowly he stops counting the stars and starts counting the seconds between moments.  Moments of pain, moments of fear.  Moments of remembering what he has to worry about.

He hears footsteps and doesn’t move because it hurts, but it also hurts not to.  There’s no escape anymore.  There’s a thump as something heavy hits the ground.  ‘Fix him.’  Krzik growls.

The shuffle of limbs on the cold, bloody floor.  ‘I… I’ve been doing my best,’ the doctor says.  He should not be in this room with Krzik.  There are no answers that will make this better.  ‘It takes time.  The infection is clearing.’  Tony rolls to his side and moans.  He will take this again and he will not pass the torch.  It was a mistake to think he could win one battle.

‘No!’  Krzik drags Tony up and this time he howls as the mere movement of it sends daggers of ice and fire stabbing through his body.  Back to reality.  He’ll live the rest of his life with that peace a distant dream.  Krzik is shaking him, like a baby with a muted rattle trying to make a noise.  Tony leans in and moans.  He will hold Krzik’s attention as long as needed (he doesn’t’ have to try).

Krzik slaps him round the face.  It’s unusually restrained; Krzik hasn’t slapped him since those first few days.  It doesn’t have the same impact when everything else is knives and fire, but all the same, it hurts.  ‘You’re fixed,’ he hisses in Tony’s ear.

‘Never better,’ he mumbles as his head lolls onto Krzik’s shoulder.

‘What did he do to you?’

‘Nothing.’

Krzik turns to the doctor.  ‘What did you do to him?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You stole his pain.’

‘It… it was just medicine.’  Tony’s eyes have drifted closed but he can hear the fear in the doctor’s voice.   He wraps the fingers of his left hand around the back of Krzik’s neck to remind him who his focus is. 

‘You will make up for this,’ Krzik murmurs and that’s okay.  It’s okay.  There is nothing he can do that Tony can’t deal with.  He clicks Tony’s wrists into the shackles and pulls them taunt then runs his fingers down Tony’s cheek, claws catching and breaking skin.  ‘Come here, healer.’  The doctor doesn’t move.  ‘Come.’  Lower this time, sharper but no sign of anger.  The doctor steps closer.  Krzik grabs his hand and holds it to Tony’s chest.  ‘Do you feel that?’

The doctor hesitates.  ‘His heartbeat?’

Krzik shoves him away, his own hands taking over.  ‘Stupid human.’  His claws stab into skin and rest there like the tips of his fingers are all that’s touching.  Tony gasps but after a second it barely registers through all the other pain.  Krzik sighs.  He slacks the chains and Tony collapses.  ‘Look at him.  Watch.  Learn.  See what you have done.’

His minds has learned to drift.  Scream when queued to scream, cry when queued to cry.  When Krzik is happy it is over sooner.  His eyes meet the doctor’s and his mouth clamps shut.  He wants to say, _It’s not your fault.  Just close your eyes, don’t look, I’ll be quiet.  It’s not your fault._   But as the knife runs from the base of his neck to the curve of his ass, all that comes out is a hiss and whimper.  As fingers are buried in open wounds all he does is gasp and look away.

The doctor is begging, _stop, oh god, please stop,_ but they haven’t even started yet.  Not with the serrated knives or heated ones, no whipping or crushing, none or that strange stuff smeared on skin like salt and lemon in his wounds.  He can’t hear the doctor begging past his heart pounding in his ears.  He tries not to scream, but he isn’t strong enough.

\--

‘Do you see what you have done?’  When Tony is still and silent and Krzik is panting and painted in Tony’s blood.  The doctor is silent.  ‘Do you see?’  Krzik holds his blade to Tony’s throat.  If Tony had the energy he would laugh, because Krzik will not slit his throat, he wouldn’t make it so easy (when did that become the fantasy).

‘Ye-yes?  Yes.  I see.  God, please.  I see.  Don’t hurt him anymore.’

‘Don’t hurt him?’  Krzik drops Tony and approaches the doctor, he towers over the cowering man.  ‘You ignorant, blind fool.  No one touches my property.’  His knife sinks into the doctor’s chest, twists and slices down through his stomach, one hand on the doctor’s neck holding him in place as he struggles, as though it were a lovers’ caress.  The doctor’s hands move to the blade but it’s already come to a stop at the base of his belly.  Blood is spilling through the hole in his chest, soaking his shirt.

Krzik pushes the body free from the knife and the doctor collapses on his side.  Begging eyes lock on Tony’s, his mouth opens but his last words are swallowed by the gurgle of blood and Tony is burdened with that noise instead of words that might’ve made this mean something.

He should apologise but there are no words for this.  _I did this, I did this.  He’s dying because of me._ No apology can make that better.  Krzik leaves the room without a word.  It’s only Tony’s pain he cares to wallow in (why can’t he see that this hurts worst of all).

The doctor’s throat stops working for air, his fingers stop twitching.  His eyes are still open and locked sightless on Tony’s.  He reaches out to close them, but it’s too far.  He strains at the chain, tugging until his shoulder feels like it’s about to pop.  He can’t reach.  He turns to the wall and jangles the chains to ring them like bells drowning out his screaming thoughts.  His breath cracks with a tearless sob.  _He’s lucky,_ he thinks and almost pukes.

\--

Hours later Krzik drags the body out by its feet.  The doctor’s blood smears across the floor like thick brown paint but Krzik doesn’t seem to care.  He leaves Tony lying in the chains and kneels next to him.  His hand hovers lightly over Tony’s cheek, claws catching in his facial hair.  ‘I will not tolerate disrespect.  I am commander and king.  Your people are foolish, Stark.  You are foolish.’  Maybe he finally gets to die.  Krzik punches him in the chest and he feels his ribs shifting. 

Krzik gets up and begins to pace.  ‘There are many like you.  There have been many like you and will be many more.  And yet…’  He pauses for a sharp kick to Tony’s chest and maybe he knows what he is doing.  Maybe death like everything else will be slow and painful, but at least it will be final.  ‘You are perhaps the most enjoyable.  The jealously you’ve caused.  Military chiefs reduced to petty bickering over who should get you next.  But I find myself reluctant to give you to any of them.’  Another kick and he can’t breathe.  His lung are tight and chest is heavy like a pile of bricks have been laid on top on him.  ‘Perhaps my people will leave this world alone and I shall keep you as mine and mine alone.’

He rests his foot on Tony’s chest, no pressure, but the threat of it.  He sighs.  ‘But I am a good king.  A noble king.  I would not deprive my people.  They will have their choice of your people when the time comes.  When I am bored of you.’  Krzik’s foot pushes down and Tony’s ribs shift with it.  If he is trying to keep Tony alive, he’s doing a piss poor job of it.

But before it’s enough to kill him, a claxon rings out.  It comes so sudden and loud it sends a flash of blinding red light past Tony’s eyes and a ripple of pain across his forehead.  He thinks at first that it’s just a new form of torment, but Krzik stills for a moment then scramble to the door without another glance at Tony.  He doesn’t close the door behind him and the alarm continues to blare.  Long minutes pass and Tony’s head throbs with the sound.  His mind conjures pictures of Steve but he shakes them away.  Even if they are here, they’re not here for him.

He lays unmoving and wonders if they’ll find him here.  If they’ll hate him for not trying to help, to escape (to die).  He has already disappointed them but the thought of doing it again hurts as much as any other pain.

He reaches for the bottle, untouched in the corner with the needle still inside.  He tugs at the chains, stretch his fingers out and just barely reaches.  He twists the cap off and holds the needle between his teeth as he tries to breathe and stop his fingers from trembling.

Once it would’ve taken him seconds to do this, now his fingers are shaky and numb and the pin wobbles as his vision blurs.  He drops the pin and loses sight of it on the blood soaked floor.  A stutter of stillness as everything tells him to give up, this is no worse place to die than any other.  But he might not die here.  He runs his hands across the ground until he feels the prick of the pin stabbing the palm of his hand and he squeezes it tight, lets is dig into his flesh and breathes a sign of relief.

He pulls the pin from his palm and holds with his hand braced against his knee this time.  Shaky fingers dig at the lock with no finesse, he’s too clumsy now to do this with anything other than bruit force.  Minutes pass before he hears a click and the lock comes loose.

He thought perhaps he would feel happier, that some sense of hard won victory would overcome him, like it used to when he’d finally outsmarted some villain who’d had him at odds.  But he only feels sick.  His hands seem heavy.  Maybe it’s just the manacles but it seems a battle just to hold them up.

He tips his head back against the wall and closes his eyes.  This is his great escape attempt.  Weeks in the making and he can hardly hold his head up.  It’s this or nothing, and if he has to crawl out of here, he won’t die in this room. 

He grabs the chain hanging halfway down the wall and uses it to lever himself to his feet.  The floor is slick with blood and his feet can’t find traction, so he clings to the chain like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

He stands there for several minutes, the burns and blister on his feet searing on the cold floor before he gets the courage to move.  Step by step, brambled vines of pain crawl up and down his legs.  He drags his hand along the glassy wall but it offers no purchase.  He feels like a tightrope artist or a drunk walking the line.  His body says that this is more than it can take but he keeps moving.

The door’s ajar for the first time since that first day.  He staggers through Krzik’s room without stopping to look.  He doesn’t need to picture him sleeping on those sheet, still covered in Tony’s blood.  He carries on down the hall with no aim or direction, just an animal looking for a quiet place to die.

The sirens hurt his ears, the lights hurt his eyes.  He’s used to silence and darkness (and pain).  He watches the way his feet move, and doesn’t remember what walking feels like.  Just muscles moving like waves on the ocean.  There’s a Cyax body at his feet.  His legs stop moving but he doesn’t remember telling them to.  It’s curled in on itself like a sleeping baby, small and weak and helpless, and the scars on its face look nothing like Krzik’s (he hates that he can tell).  It looks peaceful.

He leans over and wrenches the weapon from stiff fingers.  It’s some kind of energy gun, no cartridge, an ugly bulky things with a glowing black blade attached to the barrel like a combination of flashlight and bayonet.  Three settings he can’t identify, but there’s a battle going on, so it’s probably set to something deadly.  He detaches the blade and lets it fall to the floor then puts the barrel of the gun beneath his jaw.  He leans against the wall, legs trembling, ready to give up.

It’s good.  It’s a good thing.  This can be over.  He gets to choose for this to be over.  No more waiting.  No more hope.  His back is slicking the wall with blood and it won’t hold him up much longer.

He looks at the Cyax.  There’s an arrow in its neck.  He wonders if they’ll pass back through here.  Take his body home.  Maybe they’ll bury him next to his mother.  Maybe they’ll leave him to rot like they should.  The gun is heavy and his arms sag.  The feint rumble of thunder and shouting.  The Avengers would be ashamed of him.  If he were a better man he’d want to help but all he wants is to never see them again.  He can’t let them see what’s left of him.

He takes the gun and the bayonet and staggers off in the other direction.

\--

He expects to find Cyax heading for the battle.  Maybe they’ll kill him, maybe he’ll kill them.  He cradles the gun, leans against the wall for support and doesn’t watch where he’s going until he turns a corner, catches sight of Krzik and freezes.  Large glass panels look into a control room and Krzik is standing at a computer terminal exchanging indecipherable growling noises with another Cyax.  There’s dried blood on his armour, hands and face, brown and flaking like war paint.  Tony looks at his own hands, a mix of fresh red and dried brown, patches of pale skin barely visible.  Krzik’s just a paint splashed artist and Tony’s the unfinished canvas.

His fingers clench around the blade in his left hand and he pictures it slashing Krzik’s throat.  Krzik’s blood on the floor this time, his dying screams, his desperate pleading cries (no more, please, god, no more, just let me die).

He doesn’t realise he’s moving until one Cyax is dead on the floor and Krzik is turning to him.  He takes the shot.  Krzik crumples, convulsing on the floor.  Tony steps closer and stands over him.  He’s still breathing, his eyes are wide and staring, his mouth flounders and all that comes out is some untranslated hiss.

A shot to the heart or the head is all it would take.  It would be simple.  Maybe he would’ve once.  Maybe a better man would.  But he can’t be that anymore.  The blade cuts through Krzik’s armour like warm butter and he presses it against flesh.   ‘Stark.’

‘Don’t talk.’  His hands are shaking.  Blood is dotting the edge of the blade and he hasn’t decided to do this yet.  ‘Don’t say my fucking name.’  He wonders how something so angry can sound so dead.

‘I’ll do what I want.  You are mine.  Always.’  Krzik lifts a hand and wraps it around Tony’s throat and Tony is cutting him.  Blade buried in his chest like a butcher’s knife carving up an animal.

‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’  He drops the blade. Blood dripping from his fingers.  Panting.  Vision hazy. 

Krzik is laughing.  Tony is crying.  He can’t do this.  He needs to do this.  There is too much pain inside him.  ‘You will always be mine.’  And even though it feels like it is true, Tony shakes his head. 

Shaky fingers of his left hand rest on open wounds as his mangled right ones prop up the knife.  He digs into Krzik’s flesh before he knows what he is doing. ‘Do you feel it?’ he asks in a voice that is almost a sob. ‘Is it beautiful?’  He dig his fingers in harder, squeezing organs and pulling at flesh.  ‘Are your screams like Picasso?  Is your blood like Shakespeare?  How does it feel?’  He pounds on the remnants of Krzik’s chest but there is nothing solid to take the blows.  He rest his hands on Krzik’s ribcage and looks him in the eye.  ‘Tell me how it feels?’

Krzik’s mouth moves but the words are slow to come.  Between death rattle breathing he gasps, ‘It feels like heaven.’

Tony rests his elbows in the gore that was Krzik’s chest and holds his head in his hands.  ‘No,’ he sobs.  ‘No.’ Because he can’t even have this.  There will be no dying revelation.  Krzik’s last moments will be like the bliss of a junkie having one last line.  He wraps his fingers around Krzik’s neck but his left hand is trembling too much and his right hand is too broken and painful to apply any pressure.

Krzik coughs and blood shoots from his mouth spraying Tony in the face.  It is funny, he thinks, to have someone else’s blood on his skin.  Krzik reaches out a shaky hand to Tony’s face and Tony does not pull back because in spite of it all, he can’t stop this.  He caresses Tony’s cheek, rough, trembling fingers mixing blood with blood and tears. ‘I am so proud.’

Tony pulls away with a hiss.  The words carve into his brain like the scars carved into his flesh.  He staggers to his feet and stumbles for the door.  He should never have done this.  His hand are covered in blood that is and is not his own.  He pukes in the corner and can still hear Krzik’s strained breathing.  He should shoot him.  Instead he leaves, staggering down twisting corridors and he doesn’t see a soul.

\--

He stumbles down the passage towards the sounds of gunfire and screaming.  Doesn’t care to wonder what he’ll find, only that there will be someone he can shoot and somewhere he can die.  When he created the first suit, every moment of it had been agony.  He would reach for a wrench and needles would shoot through his chest.  Every hour the tightness growing until he could feel the reaper breathing in his ear.  He had kept on then because he wanted to live.  He keeps on now because he is ready to die.  Only, he turns the corner as the noise dies down and the face that’s haunted his dreams is running his way.  He stops and stands barely inches from him.

‘Steve,’ he says and that is it.  He falls to his knees, shaking all over.  He lists forwards and strong, warm hands stop him from hitting the floor.  His face rests against Steve’s stomach and the rhythmic movement of breathing soothes like the gentle bobbing of a ship on a calm ocean.  A hand is running through his hair as if to comfort him.

‘I’ve got you,’ Steve says and Tony wonders if this is real.  He is dying and this is something to comfort him.  For the first time he feels warm.  ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’  There is something warm and wet on his face and maybe this time it isn’t blood.  He’s lifted, cradled in arms, soft and warm, breathing in the smell of human. ‘Oh god, oh god.  Don’t die.’  If he could, it would be perfect.  Dying in kind arm, to words of love and never again knowing what it is to lose that.

‘Shit, is that Tony Stark?’ Hawkeye’s here too.  ‘Then where the hell is Iron Man?’  He could laugh if he still had the energy.

‘We need to get him out of here.’

‘But –‘

‘Now.’

He’s moving again and it’s like being squeezed in a vice and hit with a hammer.  Old blood sticks Tony’s fingers to Steve’s skin and fresh blood slicks his arm and chest against Steve armour.  ‘Is he even alive?’  Tony wonders the same.  Maybe he should close his eyes.

‘Hey, Tony, stay awake.  Come on, don’t do that.  Please, please just hold on.’  He would do anything Steve asks of him.

Explosions and screaming.  He’s heard too much of those so he listens instead to the beating of footsteps and hurried breathing.  ‘Where’s Jen?’

‘She knows the plan.  She can take care of herself.’  They shouldn’t leave her for him.  He is already dead.  He opens his mouth to say as much but all that comes out is blood.  Blobs of black gravel that stick in his throat.  He might be bleeding inside.  He wonders how he made it this long.

‘Shit.  Is he going to make it?’

‘Yes.’ But he is not so sure.

‘This is fucked up, Cap.  They’re locking the place down.’

Everything smells of burning flesh, he wonders if it’s his own.  He is laid down on his back and he howls but there is no strength left in him to move.  Gentle hands roll him onto his side.  ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘He’ll be fine.  He’ll be fine,’ Steve says but it sounds like a prayer as much as a statement.

Yelling, banging, gunshots.  Steve should leave him here.  Get out alive and free and never have to know what a mess he is.  The fighting stops and he is lifted again.  Careful hands and slower steps.  He’d forgotten what it’s like to have someone who doesn’t want to hurt him.

Voices still talking.  Steve asked him to stay awake but everything is so slow and quiet.  He is sinking in a river of quicksand.  The ceiling is dotted with thousands of little lights that dance in a lullaby.  He twitches to reach for them but they’re far away and he is tired.  They’re pretty.  They remind him of the stars.  He is glad he could see them one last time and remember how it felt to fly beneath them.

Steve is still talking but it is just noise.  Distant sound of thunder.  The wind burns his skin like icy water on open wounds.  Arms curl around him with what protection they can give. Moisture in the air like a storm has passed through.

‘Oh god.  Thor, take him.  Please.  You’ve got to help him.’

‘I am not sure Don can fix this, Captain.’

‘Just take him, goddamn it.  Find Danny.’  He has never heard Steve so desperate.  Maybe Steve doesn’t know how long he’s been dead already.  He wants to tell Steve that this is alright, he’s ready for this, but all that comes out is a whimper.  He is passed to Thor and lips brush his forehead, so soft and gentle he might’ve imagined them.  ‘Please, Tony, please be okay.’  And Tony thinks that now is a good time to die.


	2. Chapter 2

Faint words, too quiet, too far away.  ‘Blood loss…we need to…’

Something tugging at his skin.  Stabbing, pulling.  Hands on his shoulders dragging him down.  He was supposed to be safe now.  He thinks he is screaming. 

‘Oh god, is he awake?’

‘Hold him still.’  There’s a hand in his stomach and he remembers what that feels like from the other end.  He wonders how Krzik survived.  Wonders how he has.

‘Can’t we knock him out?  This is wrong.’  How many times has he heard Steve’s voice while this is happening?  He tries not to hold on to fantasies, but they keep coming back.  His own brain torturing him with thoughts of what he can never have.

‘I’m not a miracle worker… needs a hospital, dammit…’

‘Don, please.’

Voices fade into a haze of blood and pain.

\--

‘I’m doing what I can.  He needs blood.  Danny’s exhausted.  I don’t have anything to work with.  I don’t even know his blood type.’  It’s strange that he is still alive.  That his heart can keep beating.  That his lungs can keep breathings.  He wonders how much blood he’s lost and how much longer this is going to take.

‘He’s A positive.’  He wishes Steve didn’t know that.

‘Great, now all I need is blood and a transfusion kit.’

‘I can do it.’

He doesn’t get a say in this.  They’re going to make him live.  He wishes he could feel grateful.  He is fading again and maybe, he hopes, they’re already too late.

\--

He wakes to heavy sheets tight against his skin.  His breath catches but he is still, the wild animal instinct to run is long suppressed. There is a dim yellow light emanating from a dusty lightshade.  The itch of bandages that cover too much of him.  Alive.  This was supposed to end with him dead.  Maybe this is better.  Maybe this is worse. 

The shallow breathing of a sleeping man beside him is the only sound to break the silence.  He doesn’t have to talk.  He doesn’t know if he remembers how to.  His mind is quiet with the barest hiss of background noise like a radio that’s been turned too low to hear.  His eyes water but he doesn’t blink.  The ceiling is painted a faded cream with drip marks where the job was half-assed.   It looks like any hotel, any office, any home.  Warm colours, warm blankets, warm skin.  He still feels cold inside.

There’s an IV in his hand, putting something inside him meant to keep him alive.  He wants to pull it out and tell them that they’re not supposed to save him.  He kept living because he had to and they’ve changed that.  They might think the right thing to do is to keep him here, that he will come out of this a better person, but they’re wrong.  He already wants a drink.  Sometimes suffering doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t make you better, it’s just suffering.

He turns to the man beside him.  Steve.  In baggy sweats and messy hair, the start of stubble dusting his cheeks.  He sees him and knows him but he does not recognise this picture.  Nothing rises inside him at the sight of it.  Steve stands on the shore and Tony is in a little boat bobbing on the ocean, squinting and reaching for something too far to feel.  There’s a sense of something in hiding, that if he pushed he could find it and drag it back to him, but he’s scared to touch it.  He’s alien inside himself.  Twisting strains the cuts on his neck so he lays back.  It hurts to look at him.  He is weak.

What strength he’d found to fight through the pain is gone now.  Every breath and heartbeat pulses through him like electricity.  He closes his eyes and tries to remember a time when he was not in pain.  He will heal.  He’ll make a suit someday and smell brewing coffee and he will not be in pain.  His hand clenches around the sheets.  It’s too much to imagine so he lets his mind drift as it has learned to do.

\--

There are hands around his throat and blood everywhere.  Steve is hanging by the neck and his blind eyes follow Tony.  ‘You did this,’ he repeats over and over.  Tony is dying.  A shadow with a knife is hovering.  He can’t move away.  ‘You did this.’  He kicks the shadow but it goes straight through.  He can smell coffee and blood.  Someone is snapping his fingers.  He might be screaming or crying.

‘Tony.  Tony.’  Again and again.  ‘You’re safe now.  It’s a dream.’  It is, but it could’ve been real.  He opens his eyes to Steve hovering, his hand outstretched like he wants to touch, but Tony is glad he isn’t.  There’s a red mark on Steve’s cheek and coffee down his shirt.  A thin smudge of blood that matches the stained bandages on Tony’s fist. 

‘I hit you,’ Tony says and his voice is raw and dry, like when he drinks too much whiskey and falls asleep open mouthed at his desk.

‘It’s fine.’ He didn’t even apologise and Steve has already accepted it. ‘I’m just glad you’re awake.  How are you feeling?’  A little blush creeps into his cheeks and he gets that coy look he always has when something embarrasses him.  Maybe he thinks there is an obvious answer to that question.

And Tony does feel like shit.  Every breath shoots fire through his lungs and very scratch of bandage and bedsheet is like pins prickling against his skin.  But there is no fresh pain.  He is warm and the bed is soft.  He wants to give an answer but he has nothing to give.  He feels calm and scared, pained and peaceful, content and miserable and a whole hell of other things he can’t identify.  ‘I don’t know,’ he says eventually.

Steve takes his hand, wraps his fingers in Tony’s, a feather touch that doesn’t hurt.  ‘You’re bleeding,’ he says and thumbs the bloody edge of the bandage.  Of course it was more than just a comfort.  ‘I’ll get Don.’  He wants to say stay.  Don’t leave me, not even for a second.  He doesn’t know how to anymore. But Steve… he must see something because he sits down and doesn’t let go.  ‘It can wait.’

He should say something.  There should be questions he wants answered.  _Where were you._ He can’t ask the questions he wants answers to.  _Why am I still alive_.  He hadn’t let himself fantasize about this and now he doesn’t even know if he wants to be here.  _How am I supposed to live like this?_

‘Tony, what happened to you… I’m so -’

But Tony can’t do this.  Not when everything is raw and fresh and hurts, hurts, hurts.  ‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘please don’t.’  He doesn’t want to hear that they might’ve saved him sooner, before he became this broken thing.  If they had only known.  If they’d been expecting Iron Man.

After a while Steve says, ‘I thought you were dead, you know?  When the attack happened.’  He should’ve died, he had no right to be one of the lucky ones.  ‘I thought a lot about the last time we talked.’  When Tony had been drunk and he’d driven Steve and Jan away because they could see how hopeless he was.  ‘I thought about the last words I’d ever say to you.  I should’ve been there for you.’  Steve’s words are heavy and he keeps staring at the bandages like they’re telling him something that Tony doesn’t want him to know.

Tony can’t do this.  His chest is tight with the weight of all the maybes he’s thought too long about.  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says because he needs it not to.  It seems forever ago and stupid for it to still be so raw but maybe it was back then that this had really started.  Maybe if he’d just taken Steve’s hand all of this would’ve been different.  'It doesn’t matter,’ he says again because it’s too late to change it now, he’s failed and failed and this is the consequence.

‘It does matter,’ Steve says.  ‘I thought you were dead.’  His breath is shaky like he can’t quite catch it.  ‘I thought I’d lost you.’  But he’s still lost.  ‘God, Tony. I should’ve been looking for you.’

He should say it again, _it doesn’t matter,_ but the words get lost somewhere.  He shakes his head but it’s weak, little more than a shiver and Steve’s not watching, his eyes are locked on the blankets.  ‘Everything’s been such a mess.’  He sounds hollow and tired and like he’s talking to himself.  ‘Everyone expected me to be strong but I missed you.’

‘Steve…’  He should say something comforting, _I’m okay, I’m alive, it’s fine now,_ but it’s not fine and he’s not okay and just because he’s breathing doesn’t mean he’s alive.  ‘I missed you too,’ he says, but that only seems to make it worse.

Steve makes a choked sound and he clenches his eyes closed and pinches the bridge of his nose like he’s trying not to cry.  ‘You’re alive,’ he says like he’s trying to convince himself.  ‘God, you’re alive.  This is supposed to be good.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tony says.  He never wanted Steve to hurt like this.

‘No.  God.  It’s not your fault.  It’s just, when I imagined this, I thought it would be different.  I thought…’ He shakes his head.  ‘It was just a fantasy.  We were so sure you were dead.’

‘I thought you were dead too.’  He’d hoped it sometimes, because it made it easier to know why Steve wasn’t coming.

‘We tried to stop them.  We were lucky to get out alive, Clint nearly died.’  Steve says it like it’s supposed to make Tony feel better, like it isn’t just a reminder that he should’ve been there to help.  ‘We’ve been trying, you know?  All this time, they’ve had us on the back foot.  I guess we’re not as strong without you.’  And maybe Steve means it to be kind and to make him feel needed but the words twist in his heart hurting as bad as the shrapnel ever did.

‘Stop.’ It comes out with a sob.  He can’t take this conversation, can’t bear the weight of more guilt on his already damaged heart.  Everything hurts too much.

‘Oh, god,’ Steve says.  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.  It’s going to be okay.  We’re going to fix this.’  And Tony doesn’t know if Steve means him or the whole damn world.  Maybe he believes only one of those is possible.  ‘We never stopped fighting, you know?’ He thinks there’s an unspoken, _and you shouldn’t either_.  He wishes it wasn’t obvious how much he wants to give up.  ‘You should rest.’  He should.  His body is heavy and sick with exhaustion.  His mind though, is still stuck in a cell.  He is scared to sleep and scared to dream.  Scared of waking up.  ‘I’ll stay with you.’

Tony doesn’t know how to tell him it won’t help.

\--

He is being dragged by his feet across a gravel road.  His fingers claw at the dirt but he finds no purchase.  They can’t take him.  God, please, please don’t let them take him.  His fingers are bloody and raw and he has nothing to hold on to.  ‘Here.’  And Steve puts a gun in his hand.  They’re dragging him too.  Tony starts to cry and so does Steve.  There’s only one bullet in the gun.  He points it at Steve’s temple and pulls the trigger.

Wakes panting and sweaty in the dark.  Tangled and tied.  He can’t escape.  He rolls to the floor with a thump that rattles through his body with a wave of pain.  There’s a figure hovering over him and oh god, oh god, it was all just a dream, and now it’s back to whips and knives and stark reality.  He lies there like a puppet with its strings cut and tries to remember how to breathe.

A light flicks on.  ‘Tony, Jesus.  What happened?’

He can’t face that voice.  Any voice.  He crawls under the bed, lays on his stomach and hides his head between his arms.  His hand is bleeding where an IV once was.  It feels good to be bleeding.  It’s how he is supposed to be.

‘Oh god.’ He hears Steve kneeling on the floor and wishes he would just go away.  No one should see him like this, least of all Steve. ‘Tony, you’re safe now.  It’s me.  It’s Steve.  It’s alright.’  He’s never heard Steve’s voice shake so bad.  He doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to see Steve’s pain.  The pain he’s causing.  He should be better than this.  ‘Please, Tony, say something.’

‘I’m fine.’  Because he’s said that so often when he’s falling apart that they’re the easiest words to say.

‘Okay.’  Even though it’s such an obvious lie, Steve doesn’t question it.  ‘Do you want me to stay?’  He want to say yes, and he wants to say no.  He says nothing.  Steve stays.

\--

The next time he wakes, he’s in the bed again lying on his stomach.  He doesn’t remember being moved.  Steve must’ve crawled under the bed and dragged him out and god, that’s pathetic.  The IV is back in his hand and he smells faintly of industrial shampoo.  They washed him and he didn’t wake up, maybe they sedated him, or maybe he’s just that broken.  Shame rolls in his stomach.  He never wanted to be this. 

Someone is peeling away the bandages on his back.  He tries to control it but he shudders and whimpers. 

‘Tony.’  Don’s voice.  ‘You’re awake?’ But he doesn’t wait for an answer.  ‘I’m just changing your bandages, nothing to worry about.  It won’t take long.  How’s the pain?’

It’s terrible and all-consuming and before he might’ve said it’s the worst pain he’d ever felt.  It doesn’t make that list anymore.  ‘It’s fine,’ he says because he doesn’t know what else to say.

‘I know you’re a strong man, Tony, but somehow I doubt that.  We have morphine.  You don’t need to suffer.  It’s in short supply these days, so we couldn’t give it while you were sleeping.  You’ll have to forgive me.  I’ll fetch you some.’  Across the room there’s an elaborate chest of oak wood drawers and Don takes out a med kit and from it a vial and syringe.  Tony’s eyes stay glued to it.  He knows the way it feels flowing through his veins and the relief it can give.  He remembers the doctor’s unfocused eyes as he lay bleeding out because of him.  His chest is tight.  He’s going to be sick. 

Don must notice something because he moves the syringe out of sight and smiles.  ‘Nothing to worry about.  I’ll call Steve if you’d like someone else here.’  He does want Steve, but he doesn’t want to ask.  He shakes his head.  He wants to close his eyes but his body is buzzing and he can’t look away. 

‘No morphine,’ he begs.

‘It will help.’

‘No morphine.’  It’s all he can say between choked breaths.

‘If you’re sure,’ Don says.  ‘I’m afraid the only alternative we have is aspirin.’

‘No morphine.’ He’s pathetic. Don is a friend.  He would rather be in pain than let a friend help him.

‘Okay.  I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.  I’m going to finish changing your bandages now.  I’ll try to be gentle, but it might hurt.’  Don doesn’t know that nothing he could do now will even really hurt, he’s known too much pain to be bothered by this.  Don’s gentle fingers on his back are nothing like pain.  Soft, soothing words with every touch almost lull him to sleep.

‘If you’ll excuse me a moment,’ Don says when he is done.  ‘I think Steve would like to know you’re awake.  He’s been very worried about you.  Hardly left your side.  I sent him to get some sleep.’

‘No.  Let him sleep.  I just… need to be alone.’

‘You’re sure?’ 

Tony nods.

‘Okay then.  You should get some sleep too.  Your body’s been through a lot and you need sleep to recover.  Would you like me to stay with you?’

And even though the answer is yes, he says, ‘No.’

Don hesitates.  ‘Okay.  I’ll just leave these here.’  He takes two aspirin from the med kit, pours a glass of water and leaves them on the table.  ‘If you need me, or anyone, or if you change your mind, please, just call.  There’ll be someone down the hall.  And Tony?’  His strained smile fades to one of pity.  He rests his hand on Tony’s arm and squeezes gently.  ‘We’re here for you.’

Don flicks the lights off as he leaves.  All the warmth in the room goes with him.

\--

He wakes to wet sheets sticking to his skin and the smell of piss stinging his nostrils.  He hasn’t wet the bed since he was a child.  Weeks spent lying in his own filth with no strength to move has taught his body that this is fine.

He pushes himself off the bed, stands on shaky feet for the first time since he’s been here.  That should be some kind of victory, but now it’s a necessity.  He pulls the sheets from the bed and balls them up.  They’ve held most of it but there’s a small damp patch on the mattress.  He can’t hide this.  It’s all too much.  He collapses to the chair and wants to cry.  They must already think he’s so pathetic, if they see this, god, if Steve see this, he can imagine his _no-big-deal_ voice, like this is something to be expected and the blush on his cheeks as he cleans the mattress and tries to act like it isn’t disgusting.  He can’t handle it.

He lifts the water jug.  It’s so heavy he has to cradle it against his forearm so he doesn’t drop it and he won’t be able to hold it for long.  It’s a goddamn water jug.  He used to bench-press his own body weight.  He pours the water over the stain and hopes it’s enough to dilute it.  He should flip the mattress, but he hardly has the energy to stand.

He staggers to the bathroom with the sheets tucked under one arm, leaning on the IV pole like an old man on a cane.  Throws the sheets in the shower, turns it on and leaves them there because he doesn’t know what else to do.  He grabs a clean towel from the rail and lays it over the damp patch on the bed then wonders what he’s going to do now.  He can’t sleep on a wet and sheet-less bed, but the thought of asking for help stirs at something deep in the back of his mind that makes him want to hide and cry.  He sits for a while and hopes it’ll dry out on its own.  Closes his eyes, because maybe if he naps for a bit he’ll wake up and be the Tony he used to be, the one who always knew how to hide his shame.

\--

There are hushed voices in the hallway.  He gets up and steps closer.  It’s Steve’s voice.  ‘You can’t ask him.  He needs to rest.  Find someone else.’

‘Who else?’ Reed asks, he sounds frustrated, like someone who’s had this discussion before.  ‘I’ve been at this since we found them but this is Tony’s expertise, not mine.  Can you make sense of them, Captain?  Do you know someone else who can?  I’m not trying to be cruel here.  We’re trying to saves lives.’

‘What about Tony’s life?  He needs saving too.’

‘Do you think this is the right world for him to recover in?  He can do this.  It might even help.  He’s always been a man who needs to keep busy.’

There’s a pause before Steve says, ‘Okay.  We’ll ask, but if he says no…’

‘Of course.’

The door pushes open and Steve steps in.   Tony staggers back, leans against the bed and tries to ignore the sudden pit of ice in his stomach.  It’s just Steve.  ‘Tony,’ he says.  ‘Christ, why are you out of bed?’

‘I needed to pee.  What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.  Nothing.  You should get back to bed.’  But Reed is hovering over Steve’s shoulder and he clears his throat.

‘Actually, Tony, we have something to ask you.’  Reed looks him up and down like he is something pitiable.  He’s right to.  Wrapped near head to toe in bandages, withered away to skin and bone.  If Tony could see himself, he would feel pity too.  Reed is still, unusually so for him.  It’s probably not as easy to ask whatever they need from Tony when faced with such a wreck. ‘But perhaps you should sit first,’ Reed says.  He stretches an arm across the room and pulls the chair toward Tony.  Gently pushes his shoulders to sit and Tony doesn’t try to fight it.

‘What do you need me to do?’ Tony asks.

‘Nothing,’ says Steve.  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.’

‘Yes, well, of course.’  Reed is pacing.  ‘It’s not a matter of must or must not, but, if you’re feeling well enough, I could really use your help on something.’

‘What?’

‘You don’t have to do this, Tony.’  Tony wishes Steve would stop saying it.  If there is some part of him that can still be more than this pile of broken limbs and pain and emptiness, then he has to do it.

‘Please.  What can I do?’

‘Well,’ says Reed, ‘When we found you…well…’ Reed’s never been the best man with words, but this is unlike him.  He keeps looking away, his arms accordioning like a pair of Slinkys in the hands of a hyperactive toddler. It must be hard to look at him like this, they’d been friends once. ‘The things is, it wasn’t exactly a rescue mission, per se.’ Tony is not surprised; he’d been under no illusion.  The Avengers have bigger and better things to do with their time than spend it searching for one drunk waste of space.  Steve is glaring at Reed, like he blames him for the truth.  ‘Naturally that changed when we realised they had you, of course.’  Tony can’t decide if it’s a platitude or not.  They’re real heroes, the kind who could never leave a man in the hands of someone like Krzik, whether it was for the best or not.

‘We didn’t know they had you, Tony,’ Steve says.

‘I know.’ He’s told himself hundreds of times: they would never come because they didn’t know they should.  He would die alone and no one would miss him.  It would’ve been better than this.

‘We would’ve come for you.’

‘I know.’ Even though only part of him believes it, it’s what Steve wants to hear.

A heavy silence settles between them and itches at Tony’s skin.  He used to be good at silence but he’s had too much time sitting in it, waiting for what’s to come.  Sometimes the silence was worse than the screaming.  He’s starting to shake again, because he has no control anymore.  If he was alone he would blast some full volume rock music until his ears bleed and his brain stops.  Instead he digs his fingers into the underside of his arm until he’s bleeding from both, because it’s a different kind of pain when he does it himself.

‘Um, as I was saying.’  Reed was never good with awkward silences.  ‘You see, we collected some blueprints while you were…captive.  I believe if we can decipher them we may be able to drive the aliens back from Earth.’

‘Blueprints?’  He thinks of the last time he’d been dying inside.  There’d been blueprints then too, his own designs.  He’d been determined to live once. 

‘For the force field generator.  I’ve been studying them since we found them, but it really is beyond my expertise.  It’s more your field, Tony.’

Maybe this is why he is still alive.  They need this one last thing from him and then it can be over.  ‘Show me.’

But Reed hesitates.  ‘I could bring them here.’

Tony pushes himself to his feet, fingers white knuckled around the IV pole.  ‘Show me.’

‘Tony.’ Steve rests a hand on his shoulder.  It’s probably supposed to be calming, reassuring.  Steve’s usually good at that.  It sends a ripple of something sick and dark through him.  He remember his hands around Krzik's throat and imagines them now around Steve’s.

‘Don’t fucking touch me.’

Steve pulls back like he’s been burned.  ‘Sorry.  God, Tony, I’m sorry.’  Tony doesn’t know what he intended, but this isn’t it.  Steve looks like he’s the one who did something wrong when it’s Tony who snapped.  He wants to be angry but Steve makes it so hard.

‘Just… just let me do this, okay?’

Steve nods.  ‘Okay.’

So Tony follows Reed out the door, leaning on the IV poll with every step.  Pain shooting up and down his legs.  Reed scuttles along, his pace untampered, as though he’s already forgotten Tony is there.  They take an elevator two flights down and Tony wonders how big this place is.  Reed leads him silently down a corridor, pausing only for biometric scans, and they enter a lab.  A straight-up copy of Reed’s lab at the Baxter building, down to the family photos on the desk. 

Tony stands in the entryway staring.  The Baxter Building is a pile of rubble in an ocean of ruins.  He saw it.  He visited it.  He checked, dammit.  He rubs his eyes and still he is standing in Reed’s lab like nothing’s changed.  ‘Take a seat,’ Reed says.  ‘Take a seat.’

‘How…?  Where are we?’  Maybe he’s losing his mind.  All the booze catching up with him.  He’d thought until now that it was some underground bunker; no windows in his bedroom, everything a little sterile but fancy, medical equipment.  Maybe some place the elite were supposed to hide in the event of an apocalypse.  It didn’t seem important.

‘Oh.  Didn’t Steve mention it?’  He’s Steve now.  Obviously.  They’ve been living in a wasteland, fighting side by side for weeks.  Secret identities were probably the least of their worries.   He wonders if Reed knows he used to be Iron Man.  ‘It’s a pocket dimension.  You see, we’ve encountered our share of disasters in our time as the Fantastic Four.  It seemed prudent to have something of a backup plan.’  For a moment he feels betrayed that Reed never told him about it, but he thinks of how long it’s been since he last saw him and knows he can’t blame Reed.  He had no time for science or friends, too busy sinking in scotch and self-loathing. 

‘How...’  How did he make it, how is it stable, how did they get here, where exactly is here.  There are so many questions he could ask and once he would’ve.  ‘How do you leave?’  Because all he ever wants now is to run away.

‘Oh there’s a front door.  It’s as easy as leaving the house.’ Reed shakes his head.  ‘But don’t worry about that for now.  Why don’t you come and see what I’ve been working on.’

So he staggers over to Reed, sits at his workbench and they read blueprints and plans and ideas and go over all the things Reed’s tried already.  Tony’s buried in six inches of paperwork before they’ve been at it ten minutes.  He reads sentences over three time before he can process them, asks Reed to repeat simple equations and logic.  It seems like hours before he’s up to speed on what might have once taken minutes.  But he’ll do this.  It’s why he’s alive.  He needs to feel his fingers on metal again, it will focus him.  It always does. ‘I’m going to work on the driver,’ he says.  ‘You have the parts?’

Reed smiles. ‘Everything’s as you remember it.’

‘Right.’  He’s working with Reed in a lab that could pass for the Baxter Building.  Nothing has changed and everything has changed.  He rolls his chair over to the cabinet and takes the tools and parts he needs and his mind shutters out all details and plays a game of normal.

He lays the pieces around him in a spread of wires and circuits like the gatherings of a greedy magpie.  He’ll start with the big parts, the easy ones, the things he’s been able to do since he was three years old.

His hands are trembling.  He can’t get the circuit to stay in the right spot.  His fingers won’t do what he tells them too.  They twitch and shake and won’t move in ways they used to.  The skin stretches tight over his knuckles where burns and cuts have scared over; it’s like someone has clamped them in place.  He lays the circuit board on the table and breathes, breathes, breathes.  He just needs to keep trying.  He can still do this.  This is who he is.  He won’t cry.

He picks it up again in hands that still tremble and as he tries to press the circuit in place, it falls from his fingers.  ‘Fuck this.  Fuck this.  Fuck all of this.’  He swipes everything from the bench to the floor.  Metal and glass and paper.  It clatters around him and does not make him feel better.  He wants to scream and he want to cry.  He wants to work.  They’ve taken the only part of him that should still be his.  He rests his head on the table and curls his arms around him. 

He rests for a minute then there’s a little tapping on his forearm.  Reed’s noodle arms stretched halfway across the room.  ‘Do you remember Tony Iommi?’

‘Reed, don’t.’  He’s not sure what he’s asking Reed for.  To leave him alone, not to give him a pep talk, not to compare his fucked up life to a rock guitarist.

‘My point is, you need time.  You’re still recovering, but you can overcome this.  You’ll make music again.  Perhaps until then I can be your hands or we can make you some.’

He doesn’t have it in him to argue.  He looks at his hands that are so fucked up he knows they’ll never heal.  He needs a drink.  When he says nothing for a while, Reed lets go of his shoulder.  He walks over, stretches his hand out like a scoop and starts to sweep up the debris that’s scattered across the floor.

‘I promise you, Tony.  Whatever I can do, you only have to ask.’  He dumps the parts out on the workbench and picks up the circuit Tony was working on.  The exact piece from a pile of scraps.  Reed is only here to babysit.  Reed looks him up and down and puts the circuit board carefully back on the bench, like it’s precious and delicate and wasn’t just thrown to the floor.  ‘But, maybe you need a break.  We’re not going to finish this tonight.  Doctor Blake said you need a lot of rest.’

He’s slept too much and he doesn’t want more, but still he’s tired.  It’s in his bones now, like his body doesn’t remember how to be awake.  Like a baby that needs it’s eighteen hours or it’ll spend all day crying.  Tony stares at the pile of wires and circuits and the way his hands still tremble and thinks that this is not a problem that will be solved with rest.  ‘Yeah,’ he says because as much as he can’t face sleep, he can’t face this more.  ‘Tomorrow.’ 

When he gets back to the bed, the mattress is clean and dry with crisp, fresh sheets and no sign that Steve was ever there.  He sinks into the mattress and closes his eyes and thinks of who he used to be.  A genius, a billionaire, a good man.  He used to be in control.  Everything that’s left of him now is disgusting, but he’ll keep going because he has to.  He owes them this.  One last good thing to make up for all his mistakes.  He has to keep going until then.  Then it can be over.  He wonders if he’ll go to hell and if hell could possibly be any worse than what he’s already lived through.

\--

He is paralysed.  On his stomach with a weight on his hips and low giggling in his ear.  There’s a pinprick of light somewhere in the distance but it moves when he tries to look at it.  Someone is crying.  He would get up and help them if he could move.  The floor is shaking like an off the scale earthquake has hit.  The walls ripple and melt into unending blackness, the giggling gets louder, the crying turns to screams.  He’s dragged by his ankles into the dark and locked in chains that reach into infinity.  His blood is pooling on the ground around stocky, armoured feet he can’t take his eyes off.  A blade swings to his throat.

\--

Sweaty sheets that stick to his skin, breath that catches in his chest and doesn’t reach his lungs.  Every time he closes his eyes.  Every fucking time.   There is no escape and no rest.  He is so tired and so awake.  He had nightmares after Afghanistan for a while, mostly of Yinsen dying in his arms, but they were fleeting and bearable and it would only take a couple sips of whiskey to send him back to sleep.   He could make himself lie here and rest like they keep telling him he needs to, but closing his eyes makes his heart beat faster.  There’s a scream or a sob working its way up his chest and lying heavy in his throat and it takes too much to fight it, so he stands instead.

He leaves the room because he can’t stand the sight of those four walls, and the feeling of those sheets on his skin and the sound of complete silence.  He’d head for the lab but the biometric scans won’t let him through, so he wanders the empty halls.  He feels like he’s escaping a mental institute.  His slippered feet shuffle across the grey carpeted floors. He tries not to look at the ground but his toes feel damp and cold anyway.  He goes inside the nearest room and takes his slippers off to feel the firm, dry floorboards beneath his toes.  He breathes and breathes and counts to ten and ten again.  He is not going to puke.  Captain America cleaned his piss from the bed, he’s not doing this too.  He looks around for a trash can.

Dusty TVs, six month old magazines, pool table set for a game.  It’s a rec room.  He wonders if they ever used it.   They must’ve, it can’t have all been reconnaissance and battle plans, Cap has always believed in the importance of down time.  Maybe they’d been down here, playing pool, laughing at Clint’s corny jokes, a team, a family.  Maybe Krzik’s knives had cut his skin at the same time Steve was smiling.

He staggers to the couch and falls to it.  The dark red leather turns his stomach. Cold and firm beneath his fingers, it is too familiar.  Everything is too familiar.  He looks away.  There is a mahogany cabinet across the room.  The glass opaque from this angle but he knows.  He closes his eyes and tastes it, dark and fiery down his still raw throat.  What peace it can bring. 

He thought he knew desperation before.  It could’ve been so easy to give it up then, when the things that kept him awake at night were laughable compared to this.  He thought he knew what it was to need numbness but now he really does.  The constant writhing in his stomach has only ever been soothed by booze.  He turns from the cabinet and rubs his brow, there’s a burning pain building behind his eyes and he needs to stop it before it gets any worse.

He walks to the cabinet dragging the IV pole with him.  Steadier on his feet than he has ever been.  Rows of bottles.  Good stuff.  Whiskey, wine, vodka, gin.  It’s much more than he would’ve expected from Reed but he’s rich enough that it makes sense.  He picks a bottle of the cheapest stuff because this is not a celebration.  He sits on the floor, back against the cabinet, bottle propped between his legs.

The fingers of his left hand are clumsy on the cap, barely the strength to twist it and he’s used to doing this with the right.  Everything is memory.  He wants to not remember.  He uses bandages for friction and doesn’t care that his fingers are bleeding.  The cap pops to the smell of relief and failure.

He brings it steady to his lips and downs it.  Swigs he would choke on if he hadn’t long grown used to it.  If he gets it over quick enough maybe it will hurt less.  He doesn’t look at how much he’s drunk, just drinks until he feels too full.  Screws the cap back on without looking.  It’s killing him inside, but that is better than feeling alive.

He feels the buzz of it already.  Psychosomatic, maybe, but nonetheless pulling his mind lower and turning down the volume.  Maybe he can sleep.  He closes his eyes and sees nothing, so he staggers to his feet and holds the bottle in the crook of his arm, the glass is cool against his clammy skin.  His robe closes over it and nothing can be seen. 

Back to his room through the still empty halls, he puts the bottle in the drawer by his bedside and covers it with a shirt.  No one can tell him he shouldn’t, but they might try and he hasn’t got it in him to fight for this.

He lays on his side and stares at the drawer, sheets pulled up to his chin.  His stomach is warm but his body still shivers.  His eyes drift closed and he settles into a dreamless sleep.

\--

He wakes up the next morning feeling more rested than he has since coming here, but there’s a hiss in the back of mind that’s waiting to come back screaming if he doesn’t keep going.  He reaches for the bottle but there’s a knock on the door and Steve pokes his head round.  He hesitates, and maybe he can smell the booze, but after a moment he shakes his head. ‘Iron Man’s here,’ he says. Tony’s heart stutters before he remembers, he is not Iron Man anymore.  ‘Tony? You okay?’

‘Yeah.’  He’s always okay.  He pulls his robe tightly closed to cover bandages and scars, rests his shaking hands beneath the blankets and tries to remember how to smile.  ‘Let him in.’

The door closes and there’s a moment of low voices in the hall before it opens again and there’s his suit (Rhodey’s suit) as bright and new as the day he made it.  ‘Hey.’  Rhodey takes the helmet off and smiles.  ‘Cap told me you’ve been through the wringer.  You’re really looking like hell warmed over, Tony.’

‘Rhodey.’  His voice quivers.  He looks at Rhodey’s face because he can’t look at the armour.  ‘Cap called you.’  After everything, why else would he be here.

‘Yeah.’  He lays the helmet on the table and looks into its eyes.  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier, I’ve been digging for information, you know?  And, well, I kind of assumed you were dead.’

‘I should be.’  Ten times over, he should be.  But maybe he shouldn’t have said that.

Rhodey hisses.  ‘Listen, Tony.  I’ve got buddie, guys who’ve been through some shit.  Maybe it’s not exactly the same, but they’ll tell you, it gets better.  You can get better.  There’s no shame in needing help.  What you’ve been though –‘

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Yeah.  I thought you’d say that.  But you know, we’re going to fix this mess and when we do, if you ever change your mind.’

‘Sure.’  He won’t.

‘I can give you numbers.  They’ll help you.  They have support groups.  Therapists.’

For people who got hurt fighting for their country, not for cowards and drunks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But it’s too much effort to argue, so he only says, ‘Okay.’

There’s silence then.  Drawn out like there is nothing left to say, when there always used to be so much.

‘Look,’ Rhodey says.  ‘I can’t stay.  I just needed to see you were alive with my own eyes.  Things are kind of a mess right now.  We’ve got rioting in DC, people are trying to fight back.  The world needs Iron Man.’ The world needs Iron Man.  It never needed Tony Stark.

‘I get it.  It’s fine.’

‘Tony…’  He pauses like he wants to say something else then shakes his head.  ‘If you need me…’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll come see you again soon, okay?’

‘Okay.’

He puts the helmet back on and stands for a moment like he’s expecting something then turns and leaves.  He hears their voices in the hall again but whatever they’re saying he doesn’t want to hear.  He tunes them out and reaches for the bottle.

Tony doesn’t want to be this, but he bottle is pulling him like a puppet master. Rhodey, Steve, they’d all be ashamed.  He sits naked on the floor with the bottle by his side playing with the thread of the carpet and looks at the clothes they’ve given him.  Soft, baggy, things that once he’d have died before wearing.  He can’t bring himself to put them on today.  There’s still a part of him that wonders when they’ll be taken from him.  He feels that way about everything now.  Steve will leave when he realises what a mess he is.

He gets up, takes the bottle and drinks.  He knows that Steve would hate him.  Steve left over this once and he will do it again because the world needs him more than Tony ever has.  If he could be stronger, maybe he could hold onto this, get better, make Steve proud.  He isn’t strong enough to do this sober.  He doesn’t deserve him.  He doesn’t deserve any of this.

When he’s drunk enough to feel numb again he wrangles the IV bag to puts his robe back on, then tucks the bottle in the crook of his arm and heads for the lab.  One foot in front of the other, slow steady.  He’s never been a wobbly drunk, but on footing that’s already unsteady, he has to focus.

‘Tony.’ 

He’s halfway down the corridor and hadn’t even noticed him.  ‘Steve.’

‘I was coming to see you.’  Steve doesn’t know how much better off he’d be if he just stayed away.

‘I was going to the lab.’

‘I’ll come with you.’  Once it would’ve made him happy to have Steve watch him work, now he can’t meet his eyes.  He’s an obligation.  A lost puppy Captain America can’t bear to take to the pound (he wishes they would put him down).

‘Where’s Don?  I want to get this thing out.’  He gestures to the IV.  He has enough constant reminders of what a wreck he is, he doesn’t need one more.

‘You need to eat.  Don said you can only lose the IV if you’re building your strength back up.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ He’s not going to live long enough to need it.

‘Kitchen’s quiet.  It’ll just be you and me.’

The bottle is heavy under his arm.  Maybe Steve can see the outline, maybe he can smell it on his skin and see it in his eyes.  He shifts his robe and shuffles his feet and doesn’t look Steve in the eye.  ‘I’m not really hungry.’

‘Please.’ 

He’s never been able to say no to Steve. ‘Okay.’

Steve holds his forearm and takes slow, measured steps until they reach the kitchen.  He pulls up a chair at the counter and leaves Tony to sit.  ‘Just something light.  Easy for your stomach.’  Steve’s voice is light, but his eyes are locked on the pan like he can’t look at him.  Tony doesn’t blame him for wanting to pretend everything is normal.  If the horrible sinking feeling in his gut and the pain every time he moves would leave him alone long enough, he’d pretend too.  The smell of coffee and reconstituted eggs turns his stomach.  He screws the top off the whiskey and sips it while Steve’s back is turned.  This is the closest to normal he can get.

‘I know we’re asking a lot of you right now,’ Steve says.  ‘I think Don’s angry that we asked you at all.’

‘I want to help.’  It’s his last chance to do something good.

‘That’s great, Tony.  Really.  But you need to take care of yourself first.  Everything else can wait.’

Steve puts the plate of eggs in front of him and sits opposite.  He watches but says nothing. Tony lifts the fork with his left hand, chews, swallows, lets it rest in his stomach like a worm that wants to find its way back out.  He focuses on the movement of it, the task to be completed.  Step one on a checklist of how-to-be-normal.  He used to like food.  Canapés at fundraisers, cheeseburgers after a difficult mission, the cookies Steve sometimes brought for Avengers meetings (the way Steve would save him some and tell Iron Man to eat them later).  The plate is clear and his stomach is churning.

There’s something in Steve’s eyes that’s trying to be a smile but it’s nothing Tony recognises.  ‘Guess you were hungry, huh?’

‘Guess so.’

Steve takes the plate and drops it in the sink.  His shoulders hunch and Tony can hear him breathing from halfway across the room.  He flicks the water on high and starts scrubbing and Tony remembers the feeling of water jets and bristled brushes on his skin.  Sweat beads on the back of his neck and goosebumps break out on his arms.  He closes his eyes and covers his ears, fingers digging into flesh as if he might squeeze his brain into submission.  He stumbles from his seat and out the door and down the mossy carpeted corridor and punches the elevator call button.  He sits inside and rests his face against the cold metal wall and gasps until his mind catches up with a body that’s run a marathon.

He takes the elevator down and sits outside the lab until Reed comes to let him in.  He makes Reed add his data to the locks so he won’t have to wait next time.  He works one handed around shaky fingers and use micro robots and computer commands to compensate and he doesn’t say a word to Reed.  Reed brings him lunch, he eats it between gulps of whiskey and pretends he doesn’t feel Reed’s eyes burning into his back. 

Hours pass, Reed falls asleep at his desk and still Tony works.  He hammers at sheet metal and saws templates and measures and tempers and is constantly reminded that Reed’s lab wasn’t made with this in mind.  He finished the last dregs of the bottle past midnight and stumbles back to his room alone.

\--

He lays on the bed above the covers, watching dust motes floating over the lampshade.  He needs a nightlight now to stop the images he wishes were just dreams.  He can’t close his eyes anymore.  If he were just a little bit drunker… 

He wanders back to the rec room and sits there with the bottle wedged between the sofa and his arm then drinks it warm and straight from the bottle.  He closes his eyes, because maybe now he can sleep.

Footsteps.  ‘Tony?’ It’s Jan, and he realises he never asked if she was still alive.  He hasn’t asked after any of them. ‘What are you doing out here?  Shouldn’t you be resting?’

‘Can’t sleep.’

‘Can I sit with you?’

‘If you want.’

She does.  And even though there’s plenty of room, she sits so close they’re touching.  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you.  Don said you were awake.  It’s just…’  Her voice is shaking like she’s on the verge of tears.  ‘Oh Tony.’  She dives into a hug that’s warm and tight and desperate.  He can feel the warmth of her tears on his shoulder.  She’s shaking and sobbing.  It hurts.  His arms stay glued to his sides like he doesn’t remember how to do this anymore.  He should comfort her.  Tell her he’s alright.  But he’s not, and maybe the lie would be comforting for a little while, but eventually, when he can’t live like this anymore, he doesn’t want to leave her wondering why.

She stays there for long minutes and when she finally pulls away he feels lost.  ‘God, I’m so sorry, Tony.’  She wipes away tears and streaked mascara on the back of her wrist and Tony smiles for a moment because even at the end of the world you can’t catch Jan without her makeup.  ‘I shouldn’t be the one sobbing, let alone on your shoulder.’

‘It’s fine.’  It is, it reminds him that he’s not the only one falling apart.  Maybe it’s selfish to feel that way, he should wish his friends were happy, but he can’t help it.  He doesn’t have much control of his feelings these days.

‘We’ve all been so worried about you.  Steve hardly left your side, you know?  I think he feels the worst of all of us.  Like, maybe if we’d helped you more before, all of this might’ve been different.’

But what she really means is if he wasn’t such a wreck.  If he hadn’t been drinking.  If he’d been with them, like he was supposed to be.  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘We’re not going to leave you to deal with this on your own.  Me, Steve, Don.  We’re going to help you.’ She rests her hand on his. And if she can’t smell the booze on him, he doesn’t want to say.  ‘I promise.’

He stays there, with her hand in his until she falls asleep.  He puts the half-empty bottle back on the shelf, then staggers back to the sofa and watches her breathing, wondering what he did to deserve this.

He sits and breathes the smell of her perfume, feels the warmth of her skin.  He tucks his hand back beneath hers and feels dirty for touching her.  She snores softly, the kind of stuttered breathing from a craned neck.  She’ll be sore in the morning but he can’t bear to wake her.  He closes his eyes and hears, touches, smells the here, the now and nothing that reminds him of what was.  He wishes he was sober enough to appreciate this.

\--

‘Oh.  Steve.  He’s in here.’  Jennifer’s voice breaks dreamless sleep.  He wants to keep his eyes closed.  He wants to hold on to this.  Warm and numb and Jan’s soft breathing on his neck.  If he could stay like this forever, everything would be fine.  But it doesn’t work like that.  Reality seeps into his bones, telling his heart to start racing and his stomach to start churning and the pain to come back.

‘Where is he?’ Steve asks.

‘Shh.  Keep your voice down.  They’re sleeping.’

‘Oh.’

‘Poor things.  She’s been so worried about him.  I think they both needed this.’

He opens his eyes.  His arm is curled up around Jan’s and her head is resting on his shoulder.  Jennifer is watching them.  Just another person he never asked after.  ‘What’s going on?’  His voice is raw and husky and it makes him shudder.  He pulls away from Jan.  He can still smell whiskey on his robe and still feel blood beneath his fingernails. 

‘Steve was having a heart attack when we couldn’t find you in your room,’ Jennifer says.

Steve looks embarrassed.  That, Tony can still recognise.  ‘Don said it’s time for a bandage change.’

He would leave his wounds to fester and poison and drag him back to where he belongs and this time, no doctor.  But he is not allowed to do that.  The Avengers have decided he is going to live, and his life is forfeit to them, he owes them too much to be so blatant.  Death will take time.  So he breathes Jan’s perfume one last time, brushes her skin as he stands, nods goodbye to Jennifer, and follows Steve back to the room that feels no different than a cell.

\--

That afternoon he works alone and doesn’t care enough to ask where Reed is.  Playing with his kids or out there somewhere, risking his life.  It should matter. He twists the last screw in place and puts the controller on the counter.  A six inch by four inch box that could be the end of all this.  There’s no way to test it at this range, but it’ll work.  Of course it’ll work.  His mind might be as scrambled as a jigsaw thrown against the wall, but there are a couple pieces that have been glued in place.  He still knows technology.

He screw the cap on the brandy he’s been sipping at all day and hides it back in the bottom drawer.  He remembers how to do this, how to still be ashamed.  His hands can shake now as much as they need to.  He pulls himself to his feet and wraps his fingers tight around the cold metal of the controller.  He was meant for this.  Just this one more thing.

He takes the elevator to the ground floor and stands so hypnotised by the lights that the doors close on him.  He wants to go back and drink the rest of the bottle until he can lay on the floor, numb.  Feel the cold of the lab’s metal floor seep into his bones and remind him of what reality is.

The doors open again and Steve is standing there in his uniform, the sweat and smoke of recent battle still on him and Tony is reminded that he knows nothing anymore.  Where Steve’s been, whatever he’s been doing, it wasn’t important enough to tell him.

‘I was coming to see you,’ Steve says.  Maybe he was, after he’d showered and changed and hidden all evidence that the world is something less than perfect.

Tony says, ‘It’s done.’

‘Done?’ There’s that little frown that once upon a time Tony thought was cute, now it’s just another reminder of the life he used to have.  Tony shows him the controller.  ‘Oh, that’s great.’  But it’s flat, like maybe he’s forgotten how to be happy too.  Tony should feel guilty for that.  He’s dragging down the people he loves as surely as a ball and chain around their ankles.  His bloodied hands turn everything good he touches to dirt, like a reverse Midas touch.  ‘How does it work?’

‘It’s complicated.’  It is, a little, but nothing Steve wouldn’t understand, nothing he couldn’t explain.

‘Can I see it?’  Tony gives it to him because he can’t remember how to say no, but maybe he never learned how to where Steve is concerned.  It’s barely passed hands and his fingers itch for it.  It shouldn’t dirty Steve’s hands.  This is Tony’s job.  ‘That’s all there is too it?’  Steve shakes his head.  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.  You’ve always been a genius.’  He might’ve preened at the comment once, but he hasn’t felt like a genius in a long time.  Steve hands him back the controller.  ‘We’ve got a meeting in an hour.  Will you come?  Or… you could just tell Reed what to do and he can pass it on.’

‘I’ll come.’

‘Okay.  That’s good.’ Steve steps inside the elevator and the room is suddenly too small.  They used to orbit each other, a kind of perfectly synchronised pair.  He felt whole when Steve was around.  They’re magnets now, his negative pulled in by the force of Steve’s positive and held there like he can’t escape.  Being this close is painful.

He steps out of the elevator and Steve looks at him like he is hurt.  Like they still belong in the same spaces.  He should say something, apologise maybe, but the doors close before he has a chance.

He walks to his room, clutching the controller in sweaty palms and sits on the edge of the bed.  He should write a note. Scrawling children’s letters on the back of his own medical notes.  But maybe it’ll be better if it’s just an accident.  Then they can pretend it’s such a shame and he’s not going to hell and they won’t have to wonder if there was anything they could’ve done.  No notes.  No cryptic goodbyes.  Just one digit off on the timer calculation.

He slips the controller into the pocket of his robe and wishes there was a zipper or a button or anything to make sure it’s secure and always with him and his, his, his.  It was a mistake to let Steve hold it.

His eyes linger on the drawer where another bottle’s buried.  If he just finishes the rest of it, maybe he’ll be drunk and maybe it’ll be easier.  But they’re going to expect him to prove himself.  They’ll look at him and know what a mess he is and say no way.  Maybe he could just do this with a gun or a rope and he wouldn’t have to pretend that everything is fine.  He’s selfish for even thinking it.  He’s going to find some part of him that still remembers how to pretend and he’s going to convince them that everything is fine.  Convince them that he can do this. 

There’s a soft knock on the door, like Tony has any privacy left, like they haven’t all seen him naked and scared and with nothing left between him and the world.  Steve’s head pokes around the door frame and Tony wonders what happened to the time.  He used to be good at keeping track of time, every precious minute necessary to keep stock prices up and employees happy and Iron Man up to date.

Steve look at his robe and slippers and his mouth twitches like he wants to say something.  ‘Meeting’s in ten,’ he says instead.

‘I need to get dressed.’  Because it’s hard to look at Steve and know how much he’s going to hurt him but every touch of fabric on oversensitive skin will be a reminder of why he has to do this.  He’s known half his life that clothes make the man and they’ll look at him and think he’s almost human and maybe he won’t even need to smile.

‘Good.  That’s great.’  Everything he does now is good and great and brilliant.  He’s never felt so patronised.  It’s like they think he’s a mistreated dog - enough _good boys_ and petting and he’ll come around.

He digs through the clothes that have sat untouched in those drawers at least as long as he’s been here.  Clean, pressed slacks and a button up shirt in Reed’s size, it would’ve fit before but it hangs on him now.  This is how he used to dress and maybe that will convince them that everything is fine, even if it feels wrong to dress like this now.  He’s a child trying on his dad’s clothes.  Steve is smiling.  He smiles back to see how it feels.  It doesn’t seem right either.

\--

He freezes at the conference door, swallows down the burning in his throat and the urge to run and hide because he never wants anyone to look at him again.  The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, whoever else is here, they’ll all be in there.  He can square his shoulders and strain a smile as much as he likes but there’s no hiding the damage.  Scars and bandages, red sleepless eyes and clothes that hang on him like he’s just escaped a concentration camp.  They know him and they know what he looks like when he’s falling apart.  He’s going to be sick.  He’s going to go in there and win a goddamn Oscar.

‘You don’t have to do this.’  There it is again.  The Steve who knows what a pathetic man he’s become.  The Steve that can read him like a fifty foot neon sign.  He’s fooling him about as well as he’s fooling himself.

‘I want to.’  He doesn’t want to, but he needs to for this to be over.  He steps past Steve and through the door.   They’re gathered around the conference table.  The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Daredevil, Danny and Luke, Wanda and Vision.  Half of New York’s superhero population are there.  There’s chatter and coffee and Clint’s feet on the table.  Jan smiles and give him a little wave and it’s almost normal.  Then Steve walks in and clears his throat and everyone is looking.  He sees pity in their eyes and it makes his skin crawl.  He wants to tell them not to look at him.  They shouldn’t see this thing he has become.

He turns to the faces he doesn’t recognise, Avenger’s now.  He’s missed so much. He offers his left hand, because his right is too damaged to take it but this is what he would’ve done before. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’

The stranger jumps to his feet and stares into his eyes in the way people only do when they’re trying not to look at the rest of you.  ‘No, not yet,’ he says.  ‘They call me Starfox.’ Starfox takes his hand and Tony holds back the urge to flinch and to run and instead he nods and smiles and pretends like the fingers touching his don’t burn like the fire that scarred him.  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Stark.  Though it’s a shame the circumstances couldn’t be better.’

‘Yes, well, maybe it’s time we did something about that.’

‘Tony’s here to discuss the device he’s been working on.’  Steve’s hand rests on small of his back and guides him to a chair and Tony lets him because his legs are showing the strain that his face has learned to hide so easily. 

Steve takes the seat next to him and their knees nearly touch and his hands rests on the table, close, like he is itching to touch and Tony almost lets him.  Is it so wrong that he wants this one last comfort?  But it is.  If he doesn’t have the strength to keep living, then he needs the strength to do this alone.  He rest his hands in his lap and looks the other way when Steve looks at him.

‘Alright then, everyone.’  He tells himself he doesn’t hear hurt in Steve’s voice.  ‘I know this meeting was supposed to be about debriefing after today’s surveillance mission, and we will get to that, but first, we’ve got an important development.’

‘Let’s cut to the chase, Cap.’ Hawkeye butts in.  He never had much patience for beating around the bush. Tony is glad of it now, his attention span’s shot to hell.  He already wants to crawl in a corner and cry.  ‘Does this mean Stark’s doohickey is ready?’

‘Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss, isn’t it, Tony?’

Tony shrugs and it sends a jolt of pain down his spine, but he keeps his face neutral.  They’re watching him, everyone’s eyes on him like they’re expecting him to spontaneously combust, or burst into tears.  He wishes it was unjustified.  ‘It’s done.’

‘Great.  Soooo, you what? Flip some switches and fiddle with your joystick and we go pound some alien ass?’

‘It’s close range only,’ Tony says.

‘Wait, so we need to go back there?’  Hawkeye asks.

‘That does not seem wise.’

‘We managed it before,’ Steve says.  ‘If it’s what Tony says is necessary, we’ll manage it again.’

‘Maybe we can amplify the radius of the device, given more time.’

‘More time.  More time.  We need to DO something already.’

The voices blend into one conglomerate of too-much-noise.  Tony presses his fingers into his eyes to try and stop the migraine building.  Too many people, too many voices, eyes on him and expectations and words he needs to say and words he can’t say. ‘Just shut the hell up.  Everyone.’  And they do.  ‘It’s an extremely complicated and delicate device.  I can’t just amplify it.  It can’t be changed and it’s not something I can just teach you how to use.’

‘I’m sure Reed, at least –‘ Steve starts.

‘Not Reed.  I’m going with you.’

‘Tony.’  Steve is using his warning voice.  Tony is sick of being treated like a child.

‘It’s my invention.  It’s my work.  It’s my mission.’

‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘I know that place.  I’ve been there.’  Seen fresh blood splashed across the floors and consoles, learned what it feels like to want someone to suffer by his hand, lost the last of his humanity.  ‘I can get us there.  I can set off the device.  You need me.’  And it true for now, they need him for this, then his job will be over.  It seems fitting he should die there, it’s where he should’ve died.

But everyone needs their say and Luke is leaning across the table, there’s sympathy in his eyes, but his voice is firm.  ‘I get why you want to come, man, but let’s be realistic here, you’re a businessman, not a fighter.’

It’s Reed’s turn to butt in. ‘I’m sorry, Tony, but I have to agree with Luke.  You don’t have any combat experience and you’re injured.  Doctor Blake said you’re lucky to be alive.  If it wasn’t for Danny’s healing chi you’d be dead.  Stay here and recover, I can plant the device.’ 

He can’t blame them for being concerned, he wouldn’t want an inexperienced civilian on a mission like this either.  If they knew he was Iron Man, it wouldn’t be an issue.  He pulls out that fake smile that still feels wrong and hopes he has enough experience to make it believable.  ‘You going to tell them, Cap, or should I?’

‘Tony…’

‘The thing is, I’m Iron Man.  Since day one.  I’ve been sparring with the very best.’  He gestures to Steve.  ‘I’ve fought with injuries more life threatening than these.’  Every time he fought with that shrapnel in his chest and wore the chestplate’s power down to its last vestiges, he courted death. ‘I’m coming on this mission.’  And he’ll take the whole damn hive down with him.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Luke raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re Iron Man?’

‘You know,’ Spiderman says, ‘now that you mention it, for a bodyguard it was kind of funny they were almost never in the same place.’

‘Well, shit, Stark, if you’re Iron Man, how did you end up…’ Clint trails off but Tony can guess where he was going.  It’s too much now to explain what a piece of shit he is, how he gave up the suit to get drunk.  How they took him in the night and he didn’t even struggle. 

His fingers dig into his thigh, squeezing, squeezing until his brain remembers how to talk.  ‘I have a suit.  Made one in the lab. It’s rudimentary, but it’s enough for this job.  I’m coming.  You need me.’  All eyes turn to Steve.  His word is god.  The choice is his.  ‘Steve.’  He hopes it’s stern and not begging.  ‘I’m coming.’

Steve watches him, he looks in his eyes and there is no one but them in the room.  ‘Okay,’ he says slowly. ‘But you stay with me.’

‘Great.’  Clint dusts his hand.  ‘So that’s sorted.  Now, what’s the plan?’

For a moment no one speaks then Jan breaks the silence like the leader she was born to be.  ‘Tony and Cap should go in the back.  We want to make sure they get to that generator unharmed.  We’ll show them what the Avengers are made of out in front, so they won’t even think to look for you.’  Tony slumps in his chair.  His part in this is done.  He doesn’t need to say any more, just needs to hold it together until the rest of them get the details worked out.  Don’t cry, don’t scream, and don’t run away.  A simple list that would’ve been easy once.  He tunes out the rest of the conversation and repeats it like a mantra.

\--

The next day it’s all go.  He downs enough vodka to get the courage to put the suit on.  Thick, unpainted metal slabs like he hasn’t worn since Afghanistan but the weapons are better and the protection is less.  He follows Steve like a lost puppy because he doesn’t remember the battle plan.  He and Thor and Steve split from the group and approach from the back.  They see half a dozen drones on the way, but a single bolt of Thor’s lightning takes them out.  It’s almost funny after all the trouble they caused him in another life (god, it seems so long ago).

They reach the base and he stops.  This is it.  He’s going back in there.  He should feel something, he supposes.  Scared, maybe, or angry.  Maybe it’s the vodka, or maybe it’s just how he is now, but it’s just a place.  A building he barely recognises that doesn’t reflect what happened inside.  Ugly and alien, but no horror movie haunted house.  There are no black clouds that hang over it.

‘Iron Man?’  Steve calls him and that doesn’t quite feel like him anymore.  Not so long ago he felt more Iron Man than Tony Stark, now, even though he’s standing in a suit with his team, he doesn’t feel like anyone.  ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’ Maybe he’ll feel different when he’s in there, but right now, there’s a sheet of reinforced metal between him and the world, everything’s about to be over, and he can pretend for these last few minutes that for one time in his miserable goddamned life he can do something right.  He doesn’t feel fine but he doesn’t feel anything.  He thought he’d forgotten how to be Iron Man, but really he’s forgotten how to be Tony Stark.  He leans into the mechanism of the suit and lets momentum carry him forward.  ‘Let’s go.’

Thor takes that cue to strike the wall with a shot of lightning and it disperses in a mist of particles leaving a large hole for them to step through.  ‘Be safe Captain, Iron Man.’ Then he flies off to help the others.  Tony doesn’t wait for Cap’s word.  He’s not really a part of this team any more.  He’s here to do this alone.

He walks through strange corridors and if not for the sound of his suit it would be silent.  Cap brings up the rear because they all just assumed he would know where he’s going.  Who knows how long he spent in this godforsaken place and nothing is familiar, nothing is etched in his memory but one room and one face and blood and pain and nothing more.

They follow the corridor down to an entryway and he pulls Cap to a stop.  There are Cyax around the corner.  Three of them, standing proud and on guard and they’ve been left here for a reason.  Their armour is different and they’re almost half the build of Krzik, but their skin glows in the half light of hall, they’re hunched with the same rounded shoulders and they walk with the same heavy strut.

‘How can we get past them?’ Steve asks like he expects Tony to still have all the answers.

He watches them pace and imagines them walking these floors to the sound of his screams. Wonders if they laughed, or tuned him out like background static, if they wished they could watch or if they wished they could take part.

He launches two miniaturised missiles and they lodge in their necks and explode before they see him.  Their bodied hit the floor, blood sprayed halfway across the room.  Not Tony’s blood this time, not yet.  It’s funny that it’s that easy.  There he was for weeks as the mercy of these monsters and a single bullet from a shoddy suit could’ve taken them.  But he didn’t have a suit.  Everything that happened he brought on himself.

The surviving Cyax is raising its weapons, so he shoots gasoline over it and fires the ignition.  It’s screaming.  He watches it writhe on the floor and wonder if maybe they really can feel pain.  He should care, but he wants them to suffer.  Every single one of them.  ‘Tony.’  Steve sounds choked.  Maybe it’s the smoke.  ‘This isn’t what we’re here for.’

‘You’re right.’ He shoots the dying Cyax like he wishes they would’ve shot him.  ‘Let’s go.’  He’s ready for this to be over.

They turn a corner and he recognises this room.  Krzik’s throne stands empty now.  He’d seen it from his knees, a hopeless, trembling wreck before Krzik had laid a single hand on him.  Here he is again, not half as drunk as he needs to be to shut this out.  It will be over soon, he holds the thought in his mind like a mantra and doesn’t let himself remember the first time he felt Krzik’s fingers in his hair.

Even once, semi-conscious, his brain won’t forget the route from here.  It’s time to ditch Steve.  ‘I need you to take this to that console over there.’ He gestures to the strange metallic orb that Krzik had used like a summoning stone.  It looks technological enough to be convincing and the suit hides the quiver in his voice.  He hates lying to Steve.  ‘Stay with it, when the light flashes green I need you to press the button.’

‘What is it?’

‘It blocks the shielding so the blast can reach the main terminal.  It doesn’t last so I need you around to set it off when the fuse is about to blow.’  His last words to Steve will be lies.  It makes him feel sick, but it’s no less than he deserves.   It’s Steve who’ll have to live with this.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?  We shouldn’t be splitting up.  It’s too dangerous.’

‘I knew you’d say no.  Just do it, or this whole mission’s a bust.’

Steve sighs.  ‘Okay.  Just be careful.’

‘Yeah.  You too.’

\--

The last time he’d walked down this corridor he’d found Steve again, now he’s leaving him.  It’s for the best.  He finds the door and hesitates before it.    He can see Krzik’s body on the floor, feel his blood on his fingers.  He has in him something vicious, something animal, and he can’t bring himself to regret it.

He walks through the door on numb feet protected by the iron suit.  There is no body and no blood, not even a small stain on the flooring.  It’s just a room.  He locks the device to the generator, starts the timer and walks to the spot where Krzik died.

He pulls off the helmet, holds it in loose fingers then lets it tumble from his hand and clatter to the ground.  There is maybe a minute left.  He slumps to the floor, closes his eyes and starts to count.  He is so tired. 

‘Tony?’ There’s a banging on the glass.  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Oh.’ This wasn’t supposed to happen.  ‘Steve. I guess I fucked up.’

‘Put your helmet back on.  Get out of there.’

He never wanted Steve to see this.  Steve is smashing down the door and coming inside and this is just one last thing he’s fucked up.  He hopes a super soldier will be strong enough to survive this.  Steve’s arms are around him, dragging him away.  Then nothing.

\--

He is still alive.   Life clings to him as easily as it lets go of those who deserve to live.  He opens his eyes to his room at the base and wonders why they keep saving him.  Steve is pacing.  There’s a bandage round his arm and cuts to his face, but he too is still alive.  Tony sits on the edge of the bed and watches him.

‘What happened out there, Tony?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I saw you take your helmet off.’

‘It was malfunctioning.’

‘Don’t bullshit me.  I know what I saw.  You tried to kill yourself.’ They’ve argued before, but this seems different.  Steve is practically vibrating with tension.

‘I guess I did.’  There’s no point in denying it.

‘Why?’

Tony laughs.  A hollow, stretched sound that’s wrung out from the depths of a soul that’s forgotten what laughter is supposed to sound like.  ‘Look at me, Steve.’  He holds up his arm and can’t tell if there is any new damage.  Fresh white bandaged cover old wounds that still ache, and hide anything that might be new.  ‘I’m a mess.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t focus.  I panic all the time over nothing.  What am I supposed to do?’

‘Killing yourself is not the solution.’

‘Then what the fuck is?’

‘You can get better.’ He doesn’t sound like he believes it.  He sounds like he’s about to cry.

‘Don’t,’ Tony says.  Don’t keep feeding him that line, don’t keep telling him it just takes time, don’t make him keep doing this, don’t be kind and understanding and human.  Don’t try to give him hope.

‘What’s the alternative?  Am I supposed to tell you to give up?’

Tony shakes his head.  ‘You’re not supposed to do anything.  I was supposed to be dead.’

Steve’s fists are clenching and he’s shaking and Tony can’t tell if he’s angry or sad.  ‘So what?’ he asks. ‘You really are giving up?’

It doesn’t feel like giving up.  It feels like this is a natural conclusion, like he’s reached the part of his life where dying makes more sense than living, because he’s already lived longer and suffered more than he should and he has nothing left to give.  Maybe that is giving up but maybe he’s done enough that he should be allowed to. ‘I don’t know,’ he says because there are no words for all that, and Steve wouldn’t hear him if there was.

‘You have to know.  You can’t kill yourself if you don’t even know.  You’ve survived all of this.  You’re here, you’re alive.  It’s over.’

But he never really survived and he never really came home.  He’s been living in purgatory and he’s ready to move on.  He lays back and closes his eyes and focuses on the only words that matter. ‘It’s over?’  He asks.  ‘They’re gone?’  It should make him happy or something, his job is done, he saw it to success and maybe that means he survived until now for a reason.  He feels nothing but tired.

‘Yes,’ Steve says.  ‘Help’s coming.  Outside the force field the country’s barely been touched.  Reed said he thinks the aliens need that artificial atmosphere to survive long term.  That’s why they colonised instead of targeting the whole planet and that’s why they left when we destroyed the generator.’

‘So it’s really over?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you have more important things to be doing.  I’m tired.’  He turns away and hopes that Steve will leave him alone.

‘Tony.’ Steve sighs.  ‘Okay.  You need to rest.  But we need to talk about this.’

‘Leave.’

‘You tried to kill yourself, Tony.  I can’t just leave you alone.’

‘I’m not going to do anything.  I just want to sleep.’  It’s the truth.  He tried and failed and maybe when he’s desperate enough he’ll try again, but right now he can’t deal with that pain and betrayal that he was never supposed to survive to see (selfish, selfish, he’s so fucking selfish).

But Steve isn’t leaving.  ‘How am I supposed to trust you?  You lied to me.  How long were you planning this?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters, dammit.  You looked me in the eye.  You let me believe you were safe.’

‘I never asked to be saved and I never made any promises.’  It’s Steve who keeps bringing him back, and Tony never asked for any of this.  He tried to make it easy, he tried to be kind, but it’s left him with this.

‘Was I supposed to leave you there?’ Steve asks.

Tony doesn’t know if he means the first time, or now, but it makes no difference.  ‘Yeah,’ says, ‘yeah, you were.  I’m not meant to be alive, Steve.’

Steve looks like he’s about to cry.  His jaw clenches and he turns his back.  ‘Then I’m not leaving.’

‘I don’t need a babysitter.’

‘Not a babysitter,’ Steve says, ‘a suicide watch.’

Tony’s reaching for the bottle in his drawer because he can’t takes this and he needs a drink and he needs this to be over and Steve keeps giving him with that goddamn _look._   ‘Goddammit, Steve.’ His fingers wrap around the bottle and he pulls it from the drawer and he doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore because he can’t keep looking at that fear and betrayal and know that he caused it.  ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’ He throws the bottle but it’s slow and there’s no weight to it and Steve side steps it easily.  The bottle hits the carpets and rolls, unbroken until it rests at the door.  Steve stares at the bottle like it’s a smoking gun and maybe it is, but Tony doesn’t care enough to hide it anymore. ‘Leave,’ he says and after a moment, without a word, Steve does.  The door clicks closed and the lights stay on.  Alone.  He picks up the bottle and drinks until he can’t feel the pain.

-

He doesn’t leave his room until the bottle is empty.  He would stay there forever if he could.  Let the world keep turning without him.  But when his head starts to thump and he can’t catch a breath for the need to run, and he can’t hold back the tide of things he doesn’t want to feel, he has to face the world (face Steve) again.

Steve is waiting in the rec room with a bottle of whiskey in his hands.  ‘I know you’ve been drinking,’ he says and Tony can’t tell if it’s a judgement.

‘I’m not trying to hide it.’  If he couldn’t before he can’t now.

‘Why are you doing this?’  _This_ he says with a weight that means more than just the booze.

Trust Steve to make it so simple.  Like this is a choice and not a necessity.  Because he’d seen his dad succumb to the bottle and couldn’t stick around to see Tony do the same.  Because he understands alcohol as the blade that causes wounds, not the bandage meant to fix them.  ‘You can’t understand.’

‘Then help me.’

He doesn’t want Steve to understand this.  So much pain and anger and fear, the only way he could ever understand is to feel what he feels and he would never wish that on Steve. ‘You ever get nightmares?’  Because Steve has asked him to try.  He doesn’t wait for a reply because he knows the answer.  ‘Every time I close my eyes I see things.  I feel things.  It’s like somewhere inside I can’t stop screaming.  I can’t relax.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t think.  I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.’

‘And this helps?’  He looks at the bottle like it’s a gun and it might as well be.

‘For a little while.’

‘What happens after a little while?’

Tony shrugs.  ‘I don’t care.  I just need to feel better now.’

‘You’re killing yourself.’

There’s no point denying it.  Steve knows, he knows.  ‘I don’t care.’

Steve flinches, whole bodied like he’s been punched in the gut.  Steve never likes to see anyone suffer.  ‘You… you need help, Tony.’

He needs to be drunk or dead.  ‘Help…’  Steve doesn’t get it.  Doesn’t get that he has wounds that will never heal and memories that will never fade.

‘They’re flying survivors out to the West Coast.  I think you should go.  Reed’s going.  They can’t raise a family here.  Hawkeye.  Wanda and Vision.  There’s nothing left for you here.’

He’s right.  There’s nothing here but the ghosts of what he’s lost.  ‘And you?

‘I’ve spoken to Director Fury.  He wants to help.  SHIELD have people for this kind of thing.  Doctors.  I think you should go with them.’

‘Are you going?’

‘There’s still good to be done here.  Searching for survivors, salvage work.  They’re already talking about rebuilding.’

Steve doesn’t want him here.  Of course he doesn’t. He didn’t want him when he was a drunk, why would he want him when he’s drunk and broken and barely a shadow of the man he used to be.  Steve is right, he should leave, he doesn’t belong here, but he doesn’t belong anywhere.  He wants to run but his legs won’t listen.  There’s too much pain for his body to do that anymore.  He turns and walks, steady and calm.

‘Tony, wait.’  But he can’t.

\--

He walks through the ruins of New York with one destination in mind.  Without the glasstop, the snow has buried the rubble in a blanket of white.  A clear horizon of dunes and flats, it could almost be farmland for how little of what once was remains.  He follows street signs for the first time in years because there’s so little left to identify.  His feet, bare but for the bandages, are bloody in minutes and numb shortly after.

The crunch of snow and the huff of his breath are the only sound.  No traffic, no people, no animals.  He could find somewhere nice and lay in the snow and no one would find him, perhaps ever.  They’d lays the foundations for the new New York over his bones and every day people would walk over his grave on their way to work.  He would be a part of the city, and no one would remember his name.  It would be nice.  He keeps walking.

He sees the statue before he recognises the spot.  Cap’s cold face looking out across the vastness of the city.  It would be able to see into his soul if it could only look at him.  The metal still shines like it was polished yesterday.  It tells his soul of happier times, when their enemies were people and they only wanted glory.  When all his problems could be buried in one glass of scotch and never any more.  When Steve would touch his shoulder and smile and he would know what happiness was.  It brings an almost smile that’s eaten by the emptiness and the fear of never feeling that again.

He turns from the statue.  There’s an overhang, a crop of half-rooms that survived the blasts.  Wrapped up in the tarp where he left it is the tech he once salvaged.  Chipped cell phones, and shattered laptops, rolled spools of conduit wire, motherboards torn from computers and TVs, rusting sheet metal from car hoods, screwdrivers and wrenches and nothing that was ever any use.  He throws the tarp aside and takes a sledgehammer from the pile.  Lifting it like a frail old man.  The stitches on his shoulder break and the blood burns his icy skin.  He brings the hammer down and what strength there is to the blow is all from the hammer’s weight.  Shards of glass and metal scatter.  He wants to do it again because he wants to feel angry.  He drops the hammer and stares at the remnants of his stupidity.

Whatever he’d been looking for, it isn’t here.  Maybe it isn’t anywhere.  He hears footstep and doesn’t care enough to look.  ‘Tony?’

He doesn’t know how to respond, so he doesn’t.  Steve steps into his line of sight, looks at him like he is broken.  He pulls a blanket from his pack and wraps it tight around Tony’s shoulders, pushes the tips to Tony’s hands, but he can’t make his fingers work.  He isn’t cold and they aren’t numb, he just can’t.  Like his body isn’t his anymore.

Steve ties a knot at his neck and the blanket blows in the wind like a cape.  He used to do this as a child, pretend he was Captain America’s apprentice – his cape could deflect bullets and glide like a flying squirrel.  He’d made one from his nannie’s sowing stock and broken his arm in three places jumping from a tree to test it.  It would’ve worked if he’d been higher up.

‘You’re too cold.’  Steve lays his pack on the ground and pushes Tony to sit on it.  He kneels and holds Tony’s foot in his lap, hisses at the touch.  ‘God, Tony.  You’re going to get frostbite.’  Tony can’t answer.  Steve takes off his boots and socks, puts the socks on Tony’s feet and boots back on his own.  ‘I’m going to carry you back.  You can’t walk like this.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘What?’

‘I want to stay here.’  Maybe some part of his soul is still here and if he hangs around long enough he’ll find it again.

‘We can’t.  It’s too cold.’  Steve’s hands are on his ankles and they feel like hotplates. 

‘I’m not cold.’  He should be.  They’re surrounded by snow and wind and he’s in a bathrobe and underwear.  Maybe in some distant part of him, he can still feel himself enough to recognise the cold, but it’s alien now.  The feelings of his body are as distant as the feelings of his mind.

‘ _I’m_ too cold,’ Steve says.

‘You don’t have to stay.’

‘I won’t leave you.’  Of course he won’t, not now.  He’s Captain America, defender of the weak, protector of the broken.  He’ll take him back and make sure he’s okay and when he’s sure, that’s when he’ll leave.  ‘Please, Tony, let me take you home.’

‘This is home.’  The Avengers are home.

‘Tony…’

‘No.  You don’t get to come here and tell me what I’ve lost.  Like I don’t know?  There’s nothing else left.  I have nothing else left.  This is my home.’

‘Okay,’ Steve says.  ‘Okay.  You can stay.  We’ll stay.’  And Steve shuffles up next to him, sits there saying nothing, doing nothing.  ‘You’re safe now, you know?’ He says after a time.  ‘It’s over.’  He’s heard it a hundred times.  He wishes that his mind would listen.

Steve rests his hand over Tony’s.  His callouses feel harsh against Tony’s raw skin but his warmth seeps into Tony’s frozen fingers.  It hurts but he would do anything to hold onto this pain, perhaps there is a beauty in it.  He shifts his hand to lock fingers with Steve and squeezes till he bleeds.

Steve pulls him close and rests his head against Tony’s.  Steve’s eyes are closed but Tony can’t keep from staring.  The shadow of afternoon stubble appearing on his cheeks, the faded scar on the edge of his left ear.  Every inch of him is something Tony needs to know.  His air carries the generic scent of military soap, a lingering hint of lunch and the sweat of a man who hasn’t know society in too long.  It’s awful and it’s wonderful.  He could live this moment forever.  But he is hollow.  The essence of a man, crushed to particle dust then flooded till nothing but a vague hint of human remains.  There is nothing good left of him to give.  ‘I can’t do this.’

Steve pulls the blanket tight around them.  ‘You can.’

‘How?’

‘Together.’  Steve’s lips meet his and everything is fire and ice.  He can feel his lungs not breathings and the ghost of the last time he was kissed.  The taste of blood and ash.  Everything is pain.  He can’t move.  He wants this to be beautiful, everything he dreamed he could never have.  Instead it is this.  Nightmares and memories.  He is crying.

Steve pulls away.  Tony wants to pull him back.  To feel the good and right of Steve’s skin against his.  For it to be how it’s supposed to be.  To beg God to let him have just this.  He cannot move. ‘Oh God.’ Steve sees the tears and thinks it’s him.  ‘You’re crying.’  He could laugh at the simplicity of it.  ‘I’m so sorry.’

He wants to explain himself.  Beg that it’s not that he doesn’t want this.  He wants it too much.  He is shaking.  Shaking.  Sobbing.  He buries his face in the crook of Steve’s neck.  Steve rubs his back like he’s soothing a child.  He’s shaking with it, getting snot and tears down Steve’s shirt.  Clinging to him.  He can’t even have this.  One moment of joy and he can’t have it.  This will forever be the first time they kissed.

‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ Steve says.

Tony shakes his head.  He can’t explain how much he wants this.  How much he’s always wanted this.  Can’t make it better, can’t make it go away, so he pulls Steve back into the kiss, rests his broken hand in his hair and holds his face with the other.  Steve is holding him like he is something delicate and he wishes he was wrong.  It’s nothing like it was supposed to be.

He pulls back to breathe and there are still tears in his eyes and he doesn’t know if he is happy or scared.  Too much of him is broken.  The man who could’ve had this is long gone.  What’s left of him would drag Steve down like iron boots and hold him under until he drowns because once he has it he can never let go.  ‘I can’t do this,’ he says and this time Steve doesn’t argue.

‘Let me take you back to the base.  Please.’

‘I want to stay here.  The mansion’s my home.’  And maybe that hasn’t been true for some time, but it’s the only place where it has ever felt true.

‘We can come back.  Rebuild.’  He thinks of the mansion, built by his hands and Steve’s.  A place that’s theirs, together.  A home.  It hurts just to think about.

‘You promise?’

‘Promise.’  And Tony believes him, because Captain America never breaks a promise.  He lets Steve carry him through the snow, his arms wrapped around Steve’s neck.  Steve lays him down beneath heated blankets and fusses until he falls asleep.

\--

The next morning Steve sticks his head round the door with a tentative smile and Tony has to look away because something tightens in his throat and he wonders if Steve’s lips on his were just a dream.  ‘Tony?’ Steve says and Tony can only shake his head.  ‘A promise is a promise,’ Steve says, he steps inside and he’s carrying a box.  He lays it at Tony’s feet.  It’s full of clothes. Vest and shirt, a cable knit sweater in the ugliest puke green.  ‘It’s too cold to be out in a robe and slippers.’

Tony pulls on the sweater.  ‘Are we…?’

Steve nods.  He shouldn’t be surprised.  Steve isn’t the kind of guy to break a promise.  All the same, he’d expected justifications.  Once you’re doing better.  Once it’s warmer.  Once the more important work is done.  ‘Get dressed.’

Back to the box.  Warm fuzzy pants, the kinds you’d wear for reading by the fire.  Once he would’ve questioned them, argued that they make him look like a teddy bear.  Now though, they’re like clouds against his tender skin and it’s too much like comfort to care what he looks like.  Hat and scarf and gloves and if he cared enough to argue, he’d say it was overkill for anything less than the Antarctic.  He puts them on.

Thick cotton socks and boots that are only half a size too big.  ‘I could only find eleven.’  And he wonders if Steve knowns how much it doesn’t matter.  He’s lived with less.  That someone cares enough to bring him shoes and clothes and hope is precious.

‘It’s fine.’  With the bandages and the socks, they actually fit better.

‘Do you need to bring anything?  I’ve got shovels.  There’s probably a couple days work in clearing the rubble.’

‘No, I just… I want to go.’

They walk in silence through the city.  Steve close by his side, he carries both shovels.  The skies have cleared and the sun’s turned patches of the once glistening snow to grey sludge by the roadside.  Black ice that steals his footing.  He’d be lying on his ass in the gutter if Steve’s didn’t grab his arm and walk with him.

Some buildings are still almost intact. Ash settled through the openings of blown out windows, potted cactus still alive on the sill.  A little clean up and it would be habitable.  No one walks these streets.  People who sheltered there now amongst the survivors waiting for a chance to return home.  Refugees seeking sanctuary in their own country.

‘You need to rest?’ Steve asks.  He’s been standing, staring.

‘You think I’m selfish?’

Steve’s hand drifts to his, squeezes his fingers.  ‘I think you need this.  Just because it’s for us doesn’t make it selfish.’  He wishes he could believe that.

They continue until they reach the mansion then collect splintered furniture and build a fire in the dry beneath the overhang, warm tinned soup by the fire and sit in silence.  They might’ve eaten before they left, but it’s an excuse to rest before they start and maybe Steve planned it that way.

Sitting by the fire, the sound of spoon scraping tin, smell of smoke.  Blood red tomato sloshing in the can.  Shaking fingers covered in blood.  He puts the untouched soup at his feet.  Tries to breathe.  Tries not to puke.

‘Tony?’

Eyes scrunched shut, hands over his ears so he doesn’t have to hear his screaming. 

‘Tony?’  Hand on his shoulder.

He swats it and stands, grabs a shovel.  Just Steve, just soup, just nothing. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’  He leans on the shovel like a walking stick and thinks of the mop.

‘You’re shaking.’

‘It’s cold.’  But he’s sweating.

‘We don’t have to do this today.’

He wishes he could go away and come back tomorrow and everything would be better.  That one day could clear the cobwebs in his head, that one day could fade his memory.  He walks away from the fire and starts to clears a spot of shattered concrete with the shovel.  Steve grabs the larger slabs of rubble and together they begin to build a pile.

It’s painfully slow.  Even in his better days he was never made for this kind of work.  Borrow a gauntlet from Rhodey and they’d be done in an hour but it’s not about being done.  When he’s moving, his mind is quieter.  The toxic tar that lives in him is that little bit thinner.  The feel of metal causing callouses on hands that have withered to baby-soft.  The smell of fresh turned soil in the air.  Aches from strained muscles and nothing more.  It focuses his mind.  Piling up the remnants of their old life.  Jimmying free concrete too big to dig up.  Working with Steve.  Just enough thought and focus to stop him really thinking.

The sound of shovelling slows often and he knows that Steve is watching him.  He says nothing. Maybe he knows how much the silence means or maybe he doesn’t know what to say.  Tony keeps moving.

He works until he can’t anymore. Tries to lift a shattered chair that had once stood around their conference table and ends up on his ass in the dirt.  Winded and exhausted, he huddles on the spot and pulls his legs to his chest.  They’ve been at this for maybe an hour and it feels like his body is on fire.  Scared skin is tight and raw, muscles he hasn’t felt in months are burning.  He’s hardly touched the wreckage.  Soon he will have to go back to the base, lay in bed and remember who he is.

He pulls the flask from his pocket and unscrews the top.  His eyes burn as he drinks it.  Footsteps.  He doesn’t bother to hide it, just takes another swig.  ‘Tony, are you okay?’  Steve looks at the flask.  There’s something unreadable on his face.  Tony used to be able to tell what he was thinking.  ‘You need to rest,’ is all he says.

He looks down at the flask and wishes he didn’t need it.  Wishes Steve didn’t know he needs it.  Loose fingers, it falls to the ground soaking the dirt with the smell of whiskey.  He sobs.

‘Tony.’  Steve kneels next to him.  His shoulder touches Tony’s but nothing more.  Tony grabs his shirt and buries his face in Steve’s stomach.  Steve’s hand cards through his hair as he gasps tears and snot all down his sweater.  ‘It’s okay.  It’s okay.’  Because Steve can never know how not okay it is.  How it can never be okay again.  He is stuck in this battered body and stuck in this mind that has no control.  He crying in Captain America’s lap.  Halfway to drunk and halfway to dead and wishing he could be all of either.

Yesterday it had seemed simple.  They would come out here and build a home and he could feel alive again.  But broken men should dream of broken things, anything else is just a fantasy.  He breathes the cheap industrial soap of Steve’s sweater and the sweat of hard labour.  It drowns the whiskey and blood until he only feels numb.

He stops crying but Steve still holds him tight.  ‘Sorry.’  Muffled by the sweater he can’t tear himself away from.

‘You don’t need to apologise.’

‘I’m a fucking mess.’

‘You need time.’  But time doesn’t heal all wounds.  Some scar and disfigure and that never goes away.  Everything he wanted, he can’t have.

‘Can we go?’  He wanted to come here.  He was stupid to think that doing this would help.  Stupid to think that he could do something useful.  That he could be something other than broken.

So they go back to the base and he goes to the room that’s somehow become his and he turns Steve away because he can’t face all the might’ve beens.  He turns the lock and sits against the door, and lets himself cry, loud ugly sobs.  And he knows that Steve is still standing there on the other side but he can’t stop.

\--

He doesn’t want to see anyone.  Or doesn’t want anyone to see him.  He’s sick of constantly dangling on an emotional precipice.  He’s tired.  So tired.  And no amount of sleep ever leaves him rested.  Everything aches.  His bones are heavy and his skin paper thin.  There are cracks in him.  He’s this fragile thing now, a porcelain doll that’s been smashed and glued back together so many times it’s more glues than ceramic and it takes barely a touch to break it again.  His body won’t stop reminding him of everything he’s lost.  He lays spread on the floor and the carpet burns his skin.  He is still alive. 

The lamp casts a shadow of the chair across the room.  It stretches out like a hand across the carpet, almost touching his foot.  He crawls back and huddles against the wall then flicks the switch so the light goes off, but it leaves him in the dark.  In the dark it’s too easy to remember.  Cold concrete on his skin, rough hands and sharp knives.  He can’t escape this.  It’s stuck to his skin and buried deep inside.  His fists tremble from clenching.  He’s pathetic.  Crying on Steve’s shoulder.  Drinking just to sleep.  Can’t let himself enjoy anything good. 

He flicks the lamp back on and throws the chair to the floor.  It’s a stupid, fucking inanimate object.  Not a hand, not a man, just a chair.  He kicks it till his foot bleeds then watches the way the blood blossoms on pure white bandages. It reminds him that he’s alive.  It hurts.  He swipes his arm across the counter, knocking water jug and glass to the floor.  The jug doesn’t shatter.  It rests at his feet like a taunt, so he stomps on it.  Glass shatters and sticks in his foot.  He keeps crushing it until the floor is sprinkled with glass particles and blood.  He is screaming.  He punches the wall until he hears something crack and doesn’t know if it’s his hand or the plaster.

There’s a knocking on the door.  ‘Tony?  Tony, are you okay?’

‘Go away.  Go away.  Go away.’  He’s never felt like this before.  Emptied out and full of hate at the same time.  If Steve was in here now, he thinks he would hit him.

The door handle rattles.  ‘What’s wrong?  Are you hurt?’

‘I said fuck off.’

A long beat of silence then the door rattles again.  ‘Unlock the door.’

‘No.’

‘You’re scaring me.  Please.  Please let me in.’

And just like that the raging fire inside him is extinguished.  He’s scaring Steve.  He’s scaring himself.  ‘I can’t.’

‘Talk to me, Tony.’

He limps to the door, rests his head against it.  Steve is on the other side.  Why does he feel so alone when everyone who cares about him is here. ‘I’m sick of this,’ he says and slides to the floor, back leaning against the door.  ‘Or just sick.’  He likes to imagine that Steve does the same, that there’s only cheap plywood between them, their backs almost touching.  ‘He cut me up,’ it’s hardly a whisper, and maybe Steve can’t hear.  ‘Whipped me.  Burned me.  I used to think about you.  I thought you would tell me to be strong.  I thought you weren’t coming.’

There is silence for a time.  Maybe Steve really can’t hear him and maybe that’s for the best, it’s all there on his body and Steve shouldn’t need his words to paint that image when it’s there for everyone to see.  The lead in his boots is no lighter for saying the words and he feels no closer to better.

But Steve does speak eventually.  ‘I would have come,’ he says.  It’s quiet and close and he could almost have imagined it.  Maybe Steve thinks it would be better if he didn’t hear either.  Maybe the words are as painful and hard for him as they are for Tony.

‘But you didn’t,’ Tony says, and it’s a cruel and selfish thing to say and he wishes he was better than that but he’s a cruel and selfish person now.  He’s too tired and in too much pain and he wishes he knew how to be stronger and how to get past this and how the be the man Steve wants him to be but instead he is this.

‘I know.’  Steve doesn’t even try to say he’s sorry and Tony is glad of it because he made this moment, and there’s already too much pain and too much sorrow and the only one who should be sorry is him.  ‘But I would’ve,’ Steve says.  Maybe that isn’t enough, but maybe it has to be.  He wants to see him so bad, but can’t bear to all the same.

‘Why?’  Maybe Steve would’ve come for him, but he’s not worth saving.

‘Because I love you. ’

And Tony can’t breathe.  He wants to say it back but the words are stuck in the tar inside him.  He doesn’t know if it’s worse that he can’t do this, or that he could if he’d let himself.  He says nothing.

‘Will you let me in?’

‘Okay.’  He flicks the lock with numb fingers and stands on numb feet.  And Steve doesn’t say anything at the blood and glass and the broken chair.  He helps Tony limp to the bed.  Picks broken glass from his foot with a pair of tweezers and lets the silence be comforting.

Then his foot is wrapped in swathes of clean, white gauze and Steve is still on one knee, fingers resting on his pulse point, and it feels like time repeating itself.  Tony is stuck as this sick animal, that’s lost its trail, walking in circles and hoping something might change.  Tony says, ‘You think I’m crazy, huh?’

‘No.’

‘I think I’m crazy.’

‘I think you’re trying to survive.’  Maybe it’s true.  His mind keeps screaming that there’s danger everywhere, and maybe that means he isn’t ready to die.

‘Can we go back?’  He asks.

‘Go back?’

‘We didn’t finish.’

‘The mansion?’ 

Tony nods.

‘If you need it.’

He doesn’t know what he needs.  This is only something to hold on to.  Something to convince himself that he is still useful.  ‘I need it,’ he says because he doesn’t know how to say anything more.

‘Then we will.’

\--

He takes the suit.  The battered burnt out chunks of metal that kept him alive only need a few tweaks to function again.  He’s too good at making the Iron Man. 

They’ve helped rebuild places before, carried lumber and bricks and held rebar in place, fused metal with low level repulsor rays.  It will make the job easier, faster, better.  That’s what he tells Steve.  It will make him feel less human. 

Jan calls in some favours because Tony isn’t rich anymore.  Tony isn’t anything anymore (nothing but a drunk and a failure and burden).  They get everything they need on her dime and he should feel guilty for that, but he’s too numb to give more than a passing nod of thanks. 

Each night Don changes bandages and stitches up the wounds he breaks with a sigh and a head shake and when he’s done, Tony drinks enough to hope for a dreamless sleep.

\--

He can’t move.  Every muscle is pulsing with agony and every movements sends electric knives skittering down his spine.  An hour from now he’s supposed to meet Steve and eat breakfast in silence like everything is fine, then head out to the mansion and work until night falls and he’s tired enough to sleep.  He screams into his pillow until he hears his door creaking.

‘Tony?’  He can’t find the strength to speak so he cries.  ‘Should I get Don?’

He groans and hopes it’s recognisable as a no.  He would’ve locked the door if he could move.  This is not who he’s supposed to be.  He’s supposed to be strong.  He’s supposed to be Iron Man.  Everything he’s been ignoring and hiding and pushing away has backed up into a tidal wave, pushing him under, drowning him.

‘Tony,’ Steve says. ‘God.’  He’s not sure if it’s a curse or a question.  ‘What can I do?’  His hand rests on Tony’s back like hot lead. It’s better and it’s worse and he just wants to be held and just wants to be alone.

‘Drink.’  He hisses through clenched teeth. ‘I need a drink.’  It dulls his body and his mind.  It’s the only panacea for this pain.  But Steve looks like he’s requesting a bullet to the head.  He won’t beg, he hadn’t got the energy.

He screams into another waves of agony and Steve sits next to him and rolls him over into his lap. The bare skin of his chest is cool against Tony’s.  He shushes and rocks as Tony moans and writhes. Cool glass touches Tony’s lips and he gasps a breath that smells of whiskey.  ‘I’m sorry.  God, I’m so sorry.’  He doesn’t know what Steve’s apologising for, so he ignores it and drinks.

He drinks until the glass is empty and even though it doesn’t help, he doesn’t ask for more.  Steve doesn’t let go.

\--

They work the next day like nothing happened.

\--

He’s painting a third coat on the bathroom wall.  Can’t get the bristle lines out around the corners.  ‘Tony, it’s done.’  Steve has been watching him for the last twenty minutes.  He’s been doing that a lot.

Tony puts down the paintbrush, but he can still see the lines.  ‘We should finish the kitchen.’

‘It’s done,’ Steve says.  ‘Everything’s done.  It’s good, Tony.  You did good.  Everyone’s going to love it.’  But that wasn’t the point.

‘Can we stay here tonight?’  On the fresh cream carpets with the clean white walls and the first of Steve’s new paintings hanging on them.  Everything carefully chosen to mean nothing.  The old Tony would’ve hated it.  The new Tony only cares that it is theirs.

‘Of course we can.’

\--

There’s a mattress made of blankets and cushions in the bedroom.  A makeshift resting place for when his broken body demands it.  ‘It’s yours,’ Steve says.  ‘I’m good on the floor. Army remember?’

‘Stay with me.’  He stands with the mattress between them, clutching the sheets to his chest like a child with a security blanket.  Doubt flickers across Steve’s face and he won’t look Tony in the eye.  Tony doesn’t blame him really, he’s a horror show now, a mess of half-healed wounds and bandages.  If Steve had ever really wanted to sleep with him - if it had been more than a pity kiss - he would’ve wanted something different.  A different man.  ‘Please.  I just… I need this.  I need to feel human again.’

‘Okay.’

So Tony kicks off his boots and strips down to his underwear and sits on the corner of the mattress.  Steve stands across the room, watching like he’s stuck to the spot.  There’s something uneasy in the way Steve looks at him.  He must look so disgusting.  He lays back and pulls the blanket up to his chin.  It will be easier this way for Steve to imagine him as he used to be.  He swallows down the urge to apologise because he didn’t choose to be like this.

‘Tony…’

‘Please.’

Steve takes off his jacket and his shoes but nothing more, then lays on his back beneath the covers and doesn’t touch.  He inhales loudly and Tony wonders if he can smell the booze in his pores. He turns his back to Steve and hopes the scars are less off-putting.  He should say something to make this less awkward.  The old Tony would know what to say.  The old Tony would be kissing Steve by now.  But it’s Steve who break the silence.  ‘Are you okay with this?’

‘Yeah.  You?’

‘Yes, if you are.’

Tony rolls back over.  Maybe there is booze on his breath but he wants this and if it disgusts Steve he only needs to walk away.   He wraps his arms around Steve and wants to be the man who might’ve taken this chance, but this is all he wants now.  Steve turns into the embrace and says nothing more.

\--

He wakes with a gasp to Steve’s dick poking at his stomach and the phantom pain of something crawling in his skin and echoing in his brain.  The muffled sighs of contented sleep speak of something better than this.  Maybe Steve is dreaming of them, what they might’ve had in better times.  He puts his hand to the crotch of Steve’s pants and Steve’s hips grind against him.  Once he would’ve been hard by now too.  He squeezes softly and Steve’s eyes flutter open. ‘Tony?’  Steve’s sleep-slurred voice.

‘Shh.’ He rubs his palm across Steve’s clothed dick.

Steve grabs his wrist and pulls it away.  ‘Don’t.’

‘I want to.’  He has always wanted to.  He can make this good for Steve.  But Steve won’t let go and he squeezing enough to hurt.  ‘Why not?’

‘Do you really want to do this, Tony?  Tell me, honestly.’

He had wanted this.  It had fuelled his dreams and fantasies for half his life.  He had imagined what those lips would feel like beneath his from the first day they met.  It would start soft and cautious, neither of them quite willing to admit what it meant.  But the power of it, the release and the passion (and the love) would dissolve into something desperate.  Steve’s neck thrown back, Adam’s apple quivering around half groaned curses.  His whispered name dancing off those lips.  The thought of it had always stirred up something desperate and hopeful and a little bit scared.  There is nothing there now.

Tony’s silence rests like a barrier between them.  He is on one side of a crumbling chasm and Steve keeps getting further away.

‘Then we won’t,’ Steve says.

Tony pulls away.  He sits on the edge of the mattress and squeezes his hands to stop them shaking.  It’s not fair.  None of this is fair.  ‘Maybe you should go.’

‘Yeah.’  Steve closes his eyes, his breathing is heavy and loud and Tony can feel the tension rippling through his muscles where their arms touch.  ‘Maybe I should.’  Movement and footsteps and the door creaks.  He’ll grease it later, grease every door in the building.  ‘This doesn’t mean never.  You just need time.  I can wait.  As long as you need, Tony.’  The door creaks again and he listens to the footsteps until there’s nothing left to hear.

He is alone and silent in the room that was supposed to be theirs, in the building that was supposed to be a home.  He pulls the hipflask from his pocket and drains the dregs then puts the blanket over his head and lets the superficial warmth fill the space that Steve has left.

\--

His flask is empty and with it, the last of Reed’s liquor.  Steve is gone.  There is nothing left to do in the mansion; it stands whole and new in the ruins of the city.  He stares out the window at the statue, at Cap’s golden back.  They’d hardly known each other a month when the statue was commissioned, but he’d fallen hard and fast.  Back then there’d been days when Tony could hardly look at him without some fantasy springing to mind.  His life is different now.  Looking at Steve only brings him pain.  He has always wanted it and now that he can have it, it does nothing for him.

He grabs his jacket and flask and heads off into the ruins of New York.

\--

He finds himself in Central Park staring at the ruins of hell.  Shards of glowing, black ceramic litter the floor.  He would’ve wanted to bring them back to the lab once, run tests and see if it was viable for anything.  He can hardly look at it without wanting to be sick.

He tilts his head back to the sky and the sun and the wind on his face and the sound of bird song.  As long as he keeps looking up everything is as it should be.  But Steve won’t let him pretend.

He turns back to the wreckage and starts to walk through it.  They’re just things.  The glint of metal that might be a familiar knife is just a thing.  It shouldn’t make his breath stop or sweat drip down his neck, it shouldn’t make him want to run or puke or drink.  It isn’t even a knife.

He fingers the cap of the empty hipflask and takes a heavy breath that doesn’t reach his lungs.  He tries to breathe in through the mouth and out through the nose and count to five like he heard on some daytime TV show once.  Or maybe it was in through the nose out the mouth.  Either way, it’s not working and the black spots dancing in his eyes are making him dizzy.

He stumbles away from the wreckage and falls to his knees, his fingers splayed across the frozen soil.  Swallowing around the bile in his throat, he closes his eyes but all he sees is blood.  He punches the ground and it sends a ripple of pain through him that conjures up flashes of memory.  Knives and blood and screaming and god, oh god.  He can’t stop it and he can’t see and he can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe.

His fingers dig into frozen soil until they bleed, just to catch the smell of it and feel it, feel it, because he’s here, he’s now.  Not there.  He’s alive, he’s safe, he’s healing.  He lays down in the dirt, panting and shivering until his limbs remember how to move and his lungs remember how to breathe.

\--

It takes a while, but his finds what he needs in the remains of someone’s kitchen.  Two bottles of Johnny Walker, unopened, undamaged.  He drags himself back to the mansion and keeps them untouched until he’s sitting on the mattress he shared with Steve.

His fingers shakes as his twists the cap off.  They always seem to do that now.  He used to have such steady hands.  He chugs until his throat burns and his lungs strain for air.  It dribbles down his chin and shirt.  The strength of it makes his eyes water.  He doesn’t feel better so he keeps drinking.

He makes his way through the bottle and it rolls in his empty stomach.  His head bobs and he’s lying on the mattress and doesn’t know how he got there or how long it has been.  He struggles to sit up and starts on the next bottle.  There’s supposed to be a point when he feels better, or numb at least.  He liked being drunk once.

He sips until fingers that don’t belong to him won’t hold the bottle and it spills across the floor.  His limbs don’t remember how to work, how to pick it up and start again, so he lays back and lets the world melt.

\--

‘Wake up, wake up.  Oh god.  Don’t do this.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.’ Hands and words and movement.  Shaking, cold, tired.  ‘Please, oh god, please.’  He drifts back to the darkness.

\--

Steve’s voice, but he can’t recognise the words.  There’s a ventilator forcing his lungs to breathe.  It’s an effort to let it but he doesn’t fight it.  There are fingers wrapped in his, strong and large and calloused.  His fingers run across them to make sure they’re really human.

‘Tony?’  The first word he recognises.  He’s always liked the sound of his name on Steve's lips.  The fingers shift in his, but don’t let go.  ‘Tony, are you awake?’  Even if he could speak, he doesn’t know what he would say.  Here he is, alive again, and maybe he hadn’t meant to die this time, but he hadn’t meant to live either.  ‘Please,’ Steve’s voice breaks, ‘please, tell me you’re awake.’  He squeezes Steve’s fingers as hard as he can because it hurts more to hear him like this than it does to still be alive.

Steve sobs.  Tony wants to say _, it’s okay, I’m still alive, don’t cry, I won’t leave you_.  He wants to mean those words.  He squeezes harder, but Steve only sobs more.

‘I left you there,’ he says.  ‘Alone.  I knew…’ His words break off around another sob.  Tony has made people cry before, but it’s never felt like this.  It’s never felt like he would watch the whole world burn just to make it stop.  ‘I knew you were a danger to yourself and I left you alone.  God, Tony.  I thought you were dead.’  Tony’s thumb runs in circles across Steve wrist because it’s all he can do to say sorry.  He has passed his pain to Steve because he’s too weak to handle it himself. 

‘I’m so sorry.’  For a moment he thinks the words were torn for his heart and voiced around the ventilator, but they’re Steve’s words.  Words he shouldn’t say.  Every moment he has tried, tried, tried and it’s Tony who has failed him.

He has never deserved Steve’s love.

\--

Steve’s fingers are still wrapped in his.  Tony opens his eyes this time.  Steve is half asleep in a hospital chair; he’s in a real hospital, the ventilator should’ve clued him in.  Steve is staring blankly across the room and out the window.  His hand is clammy.  Tony shifts to get a better look and Steve turns to him.  ‘Hey.’  His voice is sleep-slurred.  ‘You’re awake again.’  Steve’s eyes are red and puffy, he can’t tell if it’s from crying or sleep deprivation, maybe both.  He feels like scum.

‘I’m sorry,’ Steve says.  ‘We couldn’t treat you in New York.  You really…’ But he cuts himself off.  ‘We’re in Illinois.  Nearest state with a functional hospital.  Thor flew us out.  You’d have died if…’  His voice breaks and he stops, closes his eyes and takes a slow breath.  ‘The nurse said they can probably take the ventilator out.’  Tony wishes they couldn’t.  Wishes he would never have to speak again.  That he could lay here and listen to Steve’s voice and there would be no need to talk, or explain or apologise.  They could just be.  Steve leans across and presses the call button.  Tony’s eyes sting, but he won’t put more of this on Steve’s shoulders.  ‘What’s wrong?’  Steve squeezes his fingers harder.  ‘They’ll take it out soon.  I promise.  You’ll be fine.’

He’ll be fine.  He should be fine.  Steve murmurs soft, meaningless words that should make him feel better.  All he can thinks is that he needs another drink.

The nurse comes, tests his reflexes and takes his vitals and Steve’s hand never leaves his.  She explains the process and he nods in the right places but doesn’t really hear her.  She’s sitting him up and pulling the tube out and he’s choking.  Maybe he’s not ready for this.  Maybe they’ll pull it out and he’ll stop breathing and he’ll die before they can get it back in.  Maybe then it won’t be his fault and Steve won’t have to grieve him because it was only an accident.  The tube pops out and he stops coughing.  She straps an oxygen mask over his face, smiles at him and tells him not to talk (what would he say).  There are other words and other things and Steve is listening to her and watching her, but his fingers are still in Tony’s and that is all Tony can see and feel.

When they’re alone again, Steve won’t look at him.  ‘There are things I need to say,’ he say and finally meets Tony’s eyes, like he’s searching for permission.  ‘When I found you there, I thought…’ He pauses and takes a deep breath.  ‘I thought you’d done it.  I thought I was never going to see you, or hear you or touch you ever again.  Do you know how many times I’ve nearly lost you?  I’m scared, Tony.  Every second you’re out of my sight I can’t stop worrying.  I don’t know what to do.’

‘Steve.’  His voice is too muffled and quit to hear.  It hurts to talk.  He pulls the oxygen mask away but doesn’t know what he’s trying to say.  ‘I’m sorry.’  Those words never mean enough but they’re all he’s got.

Steve shakes his head.  ‘That’s not what I meant.  You don’t have to apologise.  I know you’re in pain.  I know you’re just trying to make it stop.  It’s not your fault.  Any of it.’

Steve gets in his head, he always has.  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Tony says and each word comes out choked and slow.  They’re black hole words, pulling him back to emotions he can’t control and threatening to swallow him up.

‘Tony.’  Steve leans across the bed, it’s awkward and the safety bar presses into his stomach but it doesn’t stop him.  He wraps his arms around Tony’s back and Tony rests his head on Steve’s shoulder.  Ugly, heavy breaths shake in his throat, threatening to turn to sobs.  He lets them.  Wild and uncontrollable, he lets his body be taken by them.  Maybe he needs this.  It hurts, but it feels good to let himself feel how much it hurts.  His fingers tense against Steve’s back and he feels the way Steve’s muscles are shaking.  Steve’s breath breaks in his ear and he realises Steve’s crying too.  ‘I love you, Tony.’  It’s shaky and desperate but there’s something unwavering in it, like he’s saying some universal truth.  Rogers’ Constant.

‘I love you too.’  He hopes the words ring as true as Steve’s did, but he can barely utter them.  They catch in his throat and come out crooked and quiet like he’s not allowed to say them and he’s sneaking them under the radar.

Steve pulls back, one hand still resting on the back of Tony’s neck. ‘We’re going to get you help.’

But Steve doesn’t get it.  There is no help for this, no psychiatrist who knows what it’s like, no self-help books or drugs designed for this.  He wants to scream that there is no getting better and he is too scared of hope to even start looking for it. ‘What help is there?’ But his voice is too hoarse and raw and weak to sound angry so he pulls his hand from Steve’s and pushes Steve’s hand from his neck.  ‘How can anyone possibly help me?

‘We can’t if you won’t try.’

‘You think I’m not trying?  You think every second of every day I’m not trying to forget what it’s like for someone to cut you open and laugh as you bleed?  You think I want to see his face and feel his skin and smell his breath every time I close my eyes?  I _am_ trying, Steve.’  Every time he takes a drink, that’s him trying, because he doesn’t know how else to cope.  But he is weak and trying isn’t enough when it wears him down until he can’t try anymore and then it comes back to this.

‘You don’t have to do this alone,’ Steve says.  ‘I’m here.  Jan’s here.  You have a family.’ Steve’s hands are wrapped so tight around the safety rail it’s starting to crack.  ‘I love you,’ Steve says and Tony knows that it’s true because he wouldn’t be hurting like this if it wasn’t. 

‘I don’t know if that’s enough.’

Steve looks away and the rail cracks.  He lets go and there are splinters of plastic stuck in his hand but he doesn’t seem to notice.   ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Steve asks.  Tony knows what broken words sound like and they don’t belong on Steve’s tongue.  He should say something to comfort him but he doesn’t know how to anymore. 

‘I don’t know.’  They’re the only words he has.

‘So that’s it then?  We’re just going to keep doing this?  You keep trying to kill yourself and I keep trying to stop you and one day,’ Steve’s voice cracks, ‘one day I’m going to have to live with knowing I didn’t do enough to help you and couldn’t be there to stop you.’ He sounds as broken as Tony feels, like he’s a wounded animal howling in pain.  Tony wonders if he’s dying inside too. 

It’s not fair that Steve should feel like this.  There’s too much pain and too much sorrow and Tony’s carrying it like it’s a dangerous pathogen.  It’s killing him and infecting those closest to him and there’s no cure because even if it kills him, they’ll be left with that pain. ‘I don’t know,’ Tony says again.  He doesn’t know if he can do this.  If he can die and leave Steve with this pain, if he can live and hold onto it himself.

‘I can’t do this.  I can’t keep losing you.’  Steve falls back to the chair, there are tears in his eyes and he’s trying to rub them away but they keep coming.  ‘I keep trying to be strong, Tony, but I’m falling apart.’

Maybe after everything it’ll be this that drives Steve away.  Maybe Steve can’t live with him anymore than he can live with himself.  ‘Maybe,’ Tony swallows around the bile building in his throat, ‘maybe you should leave.’

Steve laughs but there’s no humour in it, it’s a slow kind of hysterical laugh.  ‘That’s not what I meant.  I…’ He shakes his head and takes a slow gasping breath, like the words are too hard to get out.  ‘I need you to be strong so I can be too.  I need to think this can get better, because I can’t live without you.’  Steve starts sobbing into his hands and little streaks of blood smear his face from the cuts where the plastic splinters sit.

Tony wants to say, _it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, I’m not going to hurt you anymore,_ and they’re promises he wants to keep, because they’re both hurting but there’s only one of them he knows how to save.  ‘It’s okay,’ he says.  Just a breath of the word, not recognisable as the hope it’s supposed to convey, so he nods and hopes it’s enough.  He reaches out and cups Steve’s cheek and runs his thumb in soothing circles.  ‘It’s going to be okay.’  But there’s no confidence in it, only desperation.

Steve is staring at him with something scared and sad and desperate.  He wraps his fingers around Tony’s wrist, holding him there.  ‘Please,’ Steve begs, ‘please don’t leave me.’

Tony nods because there are no words.  He doesn’t know if he can do this, but it hurts too much to see Steve cry and not even try.  The thought of living.  The thought of feeling this every day.  The thought of waking up each morning and wondering when it’s going to be better.  He can’t.  But he will.  He’ll live like this, because Steve wants him to.  ‘I’ll try.’  For Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [On Tumblr](http://ironlawyer.tumblr.com/post/168321097567/cap-im-bb-2017-fic)


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